Number 2 Pencil

On the E-D-G-E of your

On the E-D-G-E of your S-E-A-T

Now I've seen everything. There's a new documentary called Spellbound, about a nationwide spelling bee. It's gotten a rave review from Slate, and the description of it sounds so moving and suspenseful I don't know if I could bear to watch it. It takes a skilled director to turn this topic into a "heartbreaking thriller, " and Jeff Blitz apparently has what it takes. Has anyone out there seen it?

On the E-D-G-E of your

On the E-D-G-E of your S-E-A-T

Now I've seen everything. There's a new documentary called Spellbound, about a nationwide spelling bee. It's gotten a rave review from Slate, and the description of it sounds so moving and suspenseful I don't know if I could bear to watch it. It takes a skilled director to turn this topic into a "heartbreaking thriller, " and Jeff Blitz apparently has what it takes. Has anyone out there seen it?

On the E-D-G-E of your

On the E-D-G-E of your S-E-A-T

Now I've seen everything. There's a new documentary called Spellbound, about a nationwide spelling bee. It's gotten a rave review from Slate, and the description of it sounds so moving and suspenseful I don't know if I could bear to watch it. It takes a skilled director to turn this topic into a "heartbreaking thriller, " and Jeff Blitz apparently has what it takes. Has anyone out there seen it?

Stardate 20030430.0200 I figure the

Stardate 20030430.0200

I figure the sci-fi blog date will make those of you visiting from the U.S.S. Clueless feel welcome (I'm fresh out of cool astronomy pics). Glad to see ya, folks.

Stardate 20030430.0200 I figure the

Stardate 20030430.0200

I figure the sci-fi blog date will make those of you visiting from the U.S.S. Clueless feel welcome (I'm fresh out of cool astronomy pics). Glad to see ya, folks.

Stardate 20030430.0200 I figure the

Stardate 20030430.0200

I figure the sci-fi blog date will make those of you visiting from the U.S.S. Clueless feel welcome (I'm fresh out of cool astronomy pics). Glad to see ya, folks.

The view from parenthoodThere's one

The view from parenthood

There's one aspect of this blog that's always made me feel, well, a little bit guilty, and it's that I get to poke fun at public school follies without having to really deal l with them, because I have no children. I try not to be too blithe, but I'm sure there are some topics I laugh at that just aren't funny to parents. In fact, I just got a intense letter from a Concerned Parent, Bob B., and he's given me permission to reproduce sections of it:

I always enjoy reading your comments, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my sense of humor about the absurdities you uncover. Now I tend to get angry - and frustrated - that these asinine situations continue to exist, and there is virtually nothing I can do to stop them...

My immediate reason for writing is to add to your article on the lack of writing assignments in school - and the corresponding decline in writing skills. My daughter is a sophomore in high school, and she rarely gets any writing assignments as homework. Even when she does, the rule is that her paper must be less than one double spaced typed page. The ironic thing is that she is an avid reader, has some very fine writing skills, and enjoys writing papers. Yet, I fear that with the lack of support from her teachers that skill will slowly diminish.

I am especially upset about her English course - which theoretically is supposed to include a large dose of writing activities. Yet, instead of that, virtually every "creative" assignment is to make a poster using cut-out pictures and pasted on phrases. Sometimes the students present their material in a three minute speech, but equally often the teacher grades" them by walking around the classroom and examining them for a few seconds.

There are probably several reasons for this - but there is one major one. Quite simply, the teacher does not want to take the time to read and thoughtfully evaluate written assignments...In math, they avoid grading by not even collecting papers. Instead they use the "exchange and grade the paper of the person next to you" method...

There is a lot more, but as I said before ... you already know about it. And so, while it makes me feel better to vent, and perhaps you'll get a grain or two you can use in your future writing, it really doesn't have much positive impact on the reality of our educational system.

Perhaps it's difficult for just one parent, like Bob, to have an impact - but if many parents get mad, and informed, they certainly can make a difference. In fact, Bob's letter just made one difference right here.

When I began this blog, I figured only educators, bloggers, and other psychometricians would read it. Instead, my most faithful readers have turned out to be parents who are suffering through public school stupidities, or who have chosen the homeschooling route. Bob's comments have inspired me to start focusing my posts a bit more on keeping parents informed as to how they can have an impact on their local schools. I'm not sure yet just what shape this will take, but instead of focusing solely on testing and educational inanities, I'm going to branch out and find news articles and sites that will help parents become involved in educational reform. That's the least I can do.

Thanks, Bob.

The view from parenthoodThere's one

The view from parenthood

There's one aspect of this blog that's always made me feel, well, a little bit guilty, and it's that I get to poke fun at public school follies without having to really deal l with them, because I have no children. I try not to be too blithe, but I'm sure there are some topics I laugh at that just aren't funny to parents. In fact, I just got a intense letter from a Concerned Parent, Bob B., and he's given me permission to reproduce sections of it:

I always enjoy reading your comments, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my sense of humor about the absurdities you uncover. Now I tend to get angry - and frustrated - that these asinine situations continue to exist, and there is virtually nothing I can do to stop them...

My immediate reason for writing is to add to your article on the lack of writing assignments in school - and the corresponding decline in writing skills. My daughter is a sophomore in high school, and she rarely gets any writing assignments as homework. Even when she does, the rule is that her paper must be less than one double spaced typed page. The ironic thing is that she is an avid reader, has some very fine writing skills, and enjoys writing papers. Yet, I fear that with the lack of support from her teachers that skill will slowly diminish.

I am especially upset about her English course - which theoretically is supposed to include a large dose of writing activities. Yet, instead of that, virtually every "creative" assignment is to make a poster using cut-out pictures and pasted on phrases. Sometimes the students present their material in a three minute speech, but equally often the teacher grades" them by walking around the classroom and examining them for a few seconds.

There are probably several reasons for this - but there is one major one. Quite simply, the teacher does not want to take the time to read and thoughtfully evaluate written assignments...In math, they avoid grading by not even collecting papers. Instead they use the "exchange and grade the paper of the person next to you" method...

There is a lot more, but as I said before ... you already know about it. And so, while it makes me feel better to vent, and perhaps you'll get a grain or two you can use in your future writing, it really doesn't have much positive impact on the reality of our educational system.

Perhaps it's difficult for just one parent, like Bob, to have an impact - but if many parents get mad, and informed, they certainly can make a difference. In fact, Bob's letter just made one difference right here.

When I began this blog, I figured only educators, bloggers, and other psychometricians would read it. Instead, my most faithful readers have turned out to be parents who are suffering through public school stupidities, or who have chosen the homeschooling route. Bob's comments have inspired me to start focusing my posts a bit more on keeping parents informed as to how they can have an impact on their local schools. I'm not sure yet just what shape this will take, but instead of focusing solely on testing and educational inanities, I'm going to branch out and find news articles and sites that will help parents become involved in educational reform. That's the least I can do.

Thanks, Bob.

The view from parenthoodThere's one

The view from parenthood

There's one aspect of this blog that's always made me feel, well, a little bit guilty, and it's that I get to poke fun at public school follies without having to really deal l with them, because I have no children. I try not to be too blithe, but I'm sure there are some topics I laugh at that just aren't funny to parents. In fact, I just got a intense letter from a Concerned Parent, Bob B., and he's given me permission to reproduce sections of it:

I always enjoy reading your comments, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my sense of humor about the absurdities you uncover. Now I tend to get angry - and frustrated - that these asinine situations continue to exist, and there is virtually nothing I can do to stop them...

My immediate reason for writing is to add to your article on the lack of writing assignments in school - and the corresponding decline in writing skills. My daughter is a sophomore in high school, and she rarely gets any writing assignments as homework. Even when she does, the rule is that her paper must be less than one double spaced typed page. The ironic thing is that she is an avid reader, has some very fine writing skills, and enjoys writing papers. Yet, I fear that with the lack of support from her teachers that skill will slowly diminish.

I am especially upset about her English course - which theoretically is supposed to include a large dose of writing activities. Yet, instead of that, virtually every "creative" assignment is to make a poster using cut-out pictures and pasted on phrases. Sometimes the students present their material in a three minute speech, but equally often the teacher grades" them by walking around the classroom and examining them for a few seconds.

There are probably several reasons for this - but there is one major one. Quite simply, the teacher does not want to take the time to read and thoughtfully evaluate written assignments...In math, they avoid grading by not even collecting papers. Instead they use the "exchange and grade the paper of the person next to you" method...

There is a lot more, but as I said before ... you already know about it. And so, while it makes me feel better to vent, and perhaps you'll get a grain or two you can use in your future writing, it really doesn't have much positive impact on the reality of our educational system.

Perhaps it's difficult for just one parent, like Bob, to have an impact - but if many parents get mad, and informed, they certainly can make a difference. In fact, Bob's letter just made one difference right here.

When I began this blog, I figured only educators, bloggers, and other psychometricians would read it. Instead, my most faithful readers have turned out to be parents who are suffering through public school stupidities, or who have chosen the homeschooling route. Bob's comments have inspired me to start focusing my posts a bit more on keeping parents informed as to how they can have an impact on their local schools. I'm not sure yet just what shape this will take, but instead of focusing solely on testing and educational inanities, I'm going to branch out and find news articles and sites that will help parents become involved in educational reform. That's the least I can do.

Thanks, Bob.

Scientists, engineers, and psychometriciansFirst, go

Scientists, engineers, and psychometricians

First, go read Steven Den Beste's post on engineers and the application of scientific thinking, and be sure to read the Jane Galt article that he references as well. I read both of them this morning, and they got me thinking. As a result, I have this theory that might explain why testing is so unpopular among certain educators.

My theory begins with Jane's observation that not only do liberal arts major tend to avoid scientific thought, they also tend to be hostile to those who would disprove their "theories" with logical analysis and facts:

I've been an English major. And the unfortunate tendency for those who are verbally fluent and spend four years arguing their opinion through footnotes and elegant phrasing rather than data, is to believe that a nice turn of phrase is as important as hard data. It informs the glib politics of many in the academy who often seem to think that the amusing bon mots of a Doonesbury cartoon constitute serious policy thought. And the reaction I get when explaining, say, rent control -- that somehow I'm just being mean, and that if I wanted to, I could make it so that imposing rent control improved the housing stock rather than destroying it.

Which is not to diminish the importance of literature and art. It's vital. But it's dangerous that our humanities students are so alienated from the scientific way of thought that they can't evaluate science on its own terms.

Jane's observation is two-pronged. First, many people with degrees in the liberal arts and humanities - and I include those with degrees in education in this category - place little or no importance on formulating and evaluating hypotheses, and there is little emphasis on developing a scientific mindset. I've noticed that many of those who espouse the wackier educational theories rarely follow the steps of the scientific method that Jane outlines; that is, they rarely state the underlying premises for their theories, they don't entertain other theories, they don't examine any contraditions between their theories and the premises, and they have a tendency to ignore any possible disconfirming evidence.

Second, these types of academics not only disavow the scientific method, but are openly hostile to those who utilize it. As Jane puts it, her students think she's being "mean" when she confronts their questionable economic theories with solid facts.

So. How does this relate to what Den Beste posted, and to my theory about the hostility against testing? Den Beste notes that:

Despite what [Jane] says, it's engineers and not scientists who are building the modern world. And if anything, this makes her point even more forcefully. But that's because the engineering sensibility is in a sense even more extreme than the science sensibility.

Scientists can still sometimes afford the luxury of ideological self-delusion -- it's happened many times...No engineer can... If we don't produce results more or less on time, we're automatically failures. And if we do produce results, our work is instantly tested in the cold brutality of real-world use and market acceptance. If the product doesn't work, or doesn't actually solve customer problems adequately, no amount of handwaving and nifty turns-of-phrase in the documentation will change that, or prevent it from being discovered. It will be discovered sooner, rather than later. And when it is, the product (and us) will be a failure...

Engineers cannot afford any kind of delusions; it costs too damned much.

It was clear to me, after reading this, that standardized tests are the products of educational assessment, and psychometricians are the engineers. If our tests fail, the publicity fallout is scathing and immediate. Long-lasting, too; people were still talking about NCS Pearson's scoring errors, which erroneously held back almost 8000 students, more than two years after it happened.

We have to be scientists. We have to care more about pragmatism than idealism. We can't just dream up workable mathematical item response models, or posit glib ideological explanations for why test-score gaps occur. We can't ignore the real-world validity tests that our assessments undergo, and we refuse to ignore certain relationships among test scores and educational achievements just because our conclusions are not "politically correct." We demand that educators not only look at the data, but take it seriously, and we don't allow feelings and ideologies to be "proof" that our data are not correct.

And that's where we run head-on into the idealistic educators, who have no interest in the scientific method, and outright hostility towards seeing their pet theories disproven.

One example of the schism between those who dream and those who produce in the world of educational reform is the the current fad for performance assessments (or portfolios). Those who tout these exams as an educational cure-all often have a mystical and unrealistic concept of them. They envision these exams as non-standardized, low-test-anxiety, touchy-feely, unbiased, multi-dimensional measures of "higher-level thinking" that don't require a lot of time to grade, yet are also perfectly reliable, perfectly valid, and inexpensive. These dreamers don't want to hear us when we tell them that these assessments require a great deal of funding to develop, lengthy amounts of time to administer and grade, and many controls in place to avoid rater bias.

Rater training is difficult work, and ratings must be done blind to avoid bias based on unrelated student qualities (such as race). Even with superb training, raters often disagree with one another or with the scoring rules, and the reliability of the scores is driven downward. The more qualified the rater, and the more training the rater receives, the more money they are paid.

Even if raters were perfect and cheap, developing a broad performance assessment is an extremely difficult task. If it's meant to measure something different from the multiple-choice exams, then what do we correlate the scores with to see what the test does measure? What type of items should be used? How do we quickly score open-ended items? How valid are short-answer items? What's the impact on certain subgroups if we suddenly switch item types? Do we move from one kind of test anxiety to another? And how are we supposed to combat test anxiety when certain activists keep insisting that our assessments are racially biased? Switching from an objective (multiple-choice) exam to a more subjective one increases the possibility of test bias. What if the test-score gap increases with these new assessments?

These are but a few of the many issues that we, the engineers, insist on addressing before a test goes live. Unfortunately, the idealists and politicians rarely support our realistic and pragmatic approach. In addition to the hostility and charges of racism that test developers often face, few educators and politicians bother the learn the methods required for developing and validating exams.

Evidence of this is the fact that testing companies are now given very little lead time to develop exams. This quote, from an AccessAtlanta article now buried in their archives (here's my post on it), bears repeating:

Stuart Kahl, president of Measured Progress, said the testing industry has started to expand to meet the demand...Kahl said the biggest challenge facing the industry is time. He said the companies need to create individualized tests based on each state's curriculum. The companies used to have years to develop tests, he said, but that's changed. "Instead of taking three or four years to develop an assessment system, you've got three or four months," Kahl said.

So, our educators value reform and assessment - yet we're expected to produce good tests in 1/12 the time that we had available before? Yet another sign that the scientific method, and the psychometric application of it, is not truly valued within the educational community.

Update: The two best snappy replies that I've gotten to this posting are:

(1) "Math and science are cold and hard and mean. And male and white. Wrong answers kill puppies." - Joanne Jacobs, who must be completely fed up with the anti-science crowd.
(2) "Imagine your children being graded by ice-skating judges ...'nuf said." - Tom C., who probably suspects the French are somehow involved with this whole performance assessment conspiracy...It wouldn't surprise me.

Thanks for the input, folks.

Scientists, engineers, and psychometriciansFirst, go

Scientists, engineers, and psychometricians

First, go read Steven Den Beste's post on engineers and the application of scientific thinking, and be sure to read the Jane Galt article that he references as well. I read both of them this morning, and they got me thinking. As a result, I have this theory that might explain why testing is so unpopular among certain educators.

My theory begins with Jane's observation that not only do liberal arts major tend to avoid scientific thought, they also tend to be hostile to those who would disprove their "theories" with logical analysis and facts:

I've been an English major. And the unfortunate tendency for those who are verbally fluent and spend four years arguing their opinion through footnotes and elegant phrasing rather than data, is to believe that a nice turn of phrase is as important as hard data. It informs the glib politics of many in the academy who often seem to think that the amusing bon mots of a Doonesbury cartoon constitute serious policy thought. And the reaction I get when explaining, say, rent control -- that somehow I'm just being mean, and that if I wanted to, I could make it so that imposing rent control improved the housing stock rather than destroying it.

Which is not to diminish the importance of literature and art. It's vital. But it's dangerous that our humanities students are so alienated from the scientific way of thought that they can't evaluate science on its own terms.

Jane's observation is two-pronged. First, many people with degrees in the liberal arts and humanities - and I include those with degrees in education in this category - place little or no importance on formulating and evaluating hypotheses, and there is little emphasis on developing a scientific mindset. I've noticed that many of those who espouse the wackier educational theories rarely follow the steps of the scientific method that Jane outlines; that is, they rarely state the underlying premises for their theories, they don't entertain other theories, they don't examine any contraditions between their theories and the premises, and they have a tendency to ignore any possible disconfirming evidence.

Second, these types of academics not only disavow the scientific method, but are openly hostile to those who utilize it. As Jane puts it, her students think she's being "mean" when she confronts their questionable economic theories with solid facts.

So. How does this relate to what Den Beste posted, and to my theory about the hostility against testing? Den Beste notes that:

Despite what [Jane] says, it's engineers and not scientists who are building the modern world. And if anything, this makes her point even more forcefully. But that's because the engineering sensibility is in a sense even more extreme than the science sensibility.

Scientists can still sometimes afford the luxury of ideological self-delusion -- it's happened many times...No engineer can... If we don't produce results more or less on time, we're automatically failures. And if we do produce results, our work is instantly tested in the cold brutality of real-world use and market acceptance. If the product doesn't work, or doesn't actually solve customer problems adequately, no amount of handwaving and nifty turns-of-phrase in the documentation will change that, or prevent it from being discovered. It will be discovered sooner, rather than later. And when it is, the product (and us) will be a failure...

Engineers cannot afford any kind of delusions; it costs too damned much.

It was clear to me, after reading this, that standardized tests are the products of educational assessment, and psychometricians are the engineers. If our tests fail, the publicity fallout is scathing and immediate. Long-lasting, too; people were still talking about NCS Pearson's scoring errors, which erroneously held back almost 8000 students, more than two years after it happened.

We have to be scientists. We have to care more about pragmatism than idealism. We can't just dream up workable mathematical item response models, or posit glib ideological explanations for why test-score gaps occur. We can't ignore the real-world validity tests that our assessments undergo, and we refuse to ignore certain relationships among test scores and educational achievements just because our conclusions are not "politically correct." We demand that educators not only look at the data, but take it seriously, and we don't allow feelings and ideologies to be "proof" that our data are not correct.

And that's where we run head-on into the idealistic educators, who have no interest in the scientific method, and outright hostility towards seeing their pet theories disproven.

One example of the schism between those who dream and those who produce in the world of educational reform is the the current fad for performance assessments (or portfolios). Those who tout these exams as an educational cure-all often have a mystical and unrealistic concept of them. They envision these exams as non-standardized, low-test-anxiety, touchy-feely, unbiased, multi-dimensional measures of "higher-level thinking" that don't require a lot of time to grade, yet are also perfectly reliable, perfectly valid, and inexpensive. These dreamers don't want to hear us when we tell them that these assessments require a great deal of funding to develop, lengthy amounts of time to administer and grade, and many controls in place to avoid rater bias.

Rater training is difficult work, and ratings must be done blind to avoid bias based on unrelated student qualities (such as race). Even with superb training, raters often disagree with one another or with the scoring rules, and the reliability of the scores is driven downward. The more qualified the rater, and the more training the rater receives, the more money they are paid.

Even if raters were perfect and cheap, developing a broad performance assessment is an extremely difficult task. If it's meant to measure something different from the multiple-choice exams, then what do we correlate the scores with to see what the test does measure? What type of items should be used? How do we quickly score open-ended items? How valid are short-answer items? What's the impact on certain subgroups if we suddenly switch item types? Do we move from one kind of test anxiety to another? And how are we supposed to combat test anxiety when certain activists keep insisting that our assessments are racially biased? Switching from an objective (multiple-choice) exam to a more subjective one increases the possibility of test bias. What if the test-score gap increases with these new assessments?

These are but a few of the many issues that we, the engineers, insist on addressing before a test goes live. Unfortunately, the idealists and politicians rarely support our realistic and pragmatic approach. In addition to the hostility and charges of racism that test developers often face, few educators and politicians bother the learn the methods required for developing and validating exams.

Evidence of this is the fact that testing companies are now given very little lead time to develop exams. This quote, from an AccessAtlanta article now buried in their archives (here's my post on it), bears repeating:

Stuart Kahl, president of Measured Progress, said the testing industry has started to expand to meet the demand...Kahl said the biggest challenge facing the industry is time. He said the companies need to create individualized tests based on each state's curriculum. The companies used to have years to develop tests, he said, but that's changed. "Instead of taking three or four years to develop an assessment system, you've got three or four months," Kahl said.

So, our educators value reform and assessment - yet we're expected to produce good tests in 1/12 the time that we had available before? Yet another sign that the scientific method, and the psychometric application of it, is not truly valued within the educational community.

Update: The two best snappy replies that I've gotten to this posting are:

(1) "Math and science are cold and hard and mean. And male and white. Wrong answers kill puppies." - Joanne Jacobs, who must be completely fed up with the anti-science crowd.
(2) "Imagine your children being graded by ice-skating judges ...'nuf said." - Tom C., who probably suspects the French are somehow involved with this whole performance assessment conspiracy...It wouldn't surprise me.

Thanks for the input, folks.

Scientists, engineers, and psychometriciansFirst, go

Scientists, engineers, and psychometricians

First, go read Steven Den Beste's post on engineers and the application of scientific thinking, and be sure to read the Jane Galt article that he references as well. I read both of them this morning, and they got me thinking. As a result, I have this theory that might explain why testing is so unpopular among certain educators.

My theory begins with Jane's observation that not only do liberal arts major tend to avoid scientific thought, they also tend to be hostile to those who would disprove their "theories" with logical analysis and facts:

I've been an English major. And the unfortunate tendency for those who are verbally fluent and spend four years arguing their opinion through footnotes and elegant phrasing rather than data, is to believe that a nice turn of phrase is as important as hard data. It informs the glib politics of many in the academy who often seem to think that the amusing bon mots of a Doonesbury cartoon constitute serious policy thought. And the reaction I get when explaining, say, rent control -- that somehow I'm just being mean, and that if I wanted to, I could make it so that imposing rent control improved the housing stock rather than destroying it.

Which is not to diminish the importance of literature and art. It's vital. But it's dangerous that our humanities students are so alienated from the scientific way of thought that they can't evaluate science on its own terms.

Jane's observation is two-pronged. First, many people with degrees in the liberal arts and humanities - and I include those with degrees in education in this category - place little or no importance on formulating and evaluating hypotheses, and there is little emphasis on developing a scientific mindset. I've noticed that many of those who espouse the wackier educational theories rarely follow the steps of the scientific method that Jane outlines; that is, they rarely state the underlying premises for their theories, they don't entertain other theories, they don't examine any contraditions between their theories and the premises, and they have a tendency to ignore any possible disconfirming evidence.

Second, these types of academics not only disavow the scientific method, but are openly hostile to those who utilize it. As Jane puts it, her students think she's being "mean" when she confronts their questionable economic theories with solid facts.

So. How does this relate to what Den Beste posted, and to my theory about the hostility against testing? Den Beste notes that:

Despite what [Jane] says, it's engineers and not scientists who are building the modern world. And if anything, this makes her point even more forcefully. But that's because the engineering sensibility is in a sense even more extreme than the science sensibility.

Scientists can still sometimes afford the luxury of ideological self-delusion -- it's happened many times...No engineer can... If we don't produce results more or less on time, we're automatically failures. And if we do produce results, our work is instantly tested in the cold brutality of real-world use and market acceptance. If the product doesn't work, or doesn't actually solve customer problems adequately, no amount of handwaving and nifty turns-of-phrase in the documentation will change that, or prevent it from being discovered. It will be discovered sooner, rather than later. And when it is, the product (and us) will be a failure...

Engineers cannot afford any kind of delusions; it costs too damned much.

It was clear to me, after reading this, that standardized tests are the products of educational assessment, and psychometricians are the engineers. If our tests fail, the publicity fallout is scathing and immediate. Long-lasting, too; people were still talking about NCS Pearson's scoring errors, which erroneously held back almost 8000 students, more than two years after it happened.

We have to be scientists. We have to care more about pragmatism than idealism. We can't just dream up workable mathematical item response models, or posit glib ideological explanations for why test-score gaps occur. We can't ignore the real-world validity tests that our assessments undergo, and we refuse to ignore certain relationships among test scores and educational achievements just because our conclusions are not "politically correct." We demand that educators not only look at the data, but take it seriously, and we don't allow feelings and ideologies to be "proof" that our data are not correct.

And that's where we run head-on into the idealistic educators, who have no interest in the scientific method, and outright hostility towards seeing their pet theories disproven.

One example of the schism between those who dream and those who produce in the world of educational reform is the the current fad for performance assessments (or portfolios). Those who tout these exams as an educational cure-all often have a mystical and unrealistic concept of them. They envision these exams as non-standardized, low-test-anxiety, touchy-feely, unbiased, multi-dimensional measures of "higher-level thinking" that don't require a lot of time to grade, yet are also perfectly reliable, perfectly valid, and inexpensive. These dreamers don't want to hear us when we tell them that these assessments require a great deal of funding to develop, lengthy amounts of time to administer and grade, and many controls in place to avoid rater bias.

Rater training is difficult work, and ratings must be done blind to avoid bias based on unrelated student qualities (such as race). Even with superb training, raters often disagree with one another or with the scoring rules, and the reliability of the scores is driven downward. The more qualified the rater, and the more training the rater receives, the more money they are paid.

Even if raters were perfect and cheap, developing a broad performance assessment is an extremely difficult task. If it's meant to measure something different from the multiple-choice exams, then what do we correlate the scores with to see what the test does measure? What type of items should be used? How do we quickly score open-ended items? How valid are short-answer items? What's the impact on certain subgroups if we suddenly switch item types? Do we move from one kind of test anxiety to another? And how are we supposed to combat test anxiety when certain activists keep insisting that our assessments are racially biased? Switching from an objective (multiple-choice) exam to a more subjective one increases the possibility of test bias. What if the test-score gap increases with these new assessments?

These are but a few of the many issues that we, the engineers, insist on addressing before a test goes live. Unfortunately, the idealists and politicians rarely support our realistic and pragmatic approach. In addition to the hostility and charges of racism that test developers often face, few educators and politicians bother the learn the methods required for developing and validating exams.

Evidence of this is the fact that testing companies are now given very little lead time to develop exams. This quote, from an AccessAtlanta article now buried in their archives (here's my post on it), bears repeating:

Stuart Kahl, president of Measured Progress, said the testing industry has started to expand to meet the demand...Kahl said the biggest challenge facing the industry is time. He said the companies need to create individualized tests based on each state's curriculum. The companies used to have years to develop tests, he said, but that's changed. "Instead of taking three or four years to develop an assessment system, you've got three or four months," Kahl said.

So, our educators value reform and assessment - yet we're expected to produce good tests in 1/12 the time that we had available before? Yet another sign that the scientific method, and the psychometric application of it, is not truly valued within the educational community.

Update: The two best snappy replies that I've gotten to this posting are:

(1) "Math and science are cold and hard and mean. And male and white. Wrong answers kill puppies." - Joanne Jacobs, who must be completely fed up with the anti-science crowd.
(2) "Imagine your children being graded by ice-skating judges ...'nuf said." - Tom C., who probably suspects the French are somehow involved with this whole performance assessment conspiracy...It wouldn't surprise me.

Thanks for the input, folks.

Acknowledging the problem of predatory

Acknowledging the problem of predatory teachers

After hundreds of incidences of sexual abuse by educators, state policymakers are finally beginning to pay attention. They're tightening many of the background check laws, but loopholes still exist that allow teachers who molest their students to slip away from the law:

In 42 states, applicants for state certification are required to undergo criminal-background screenings that involve fingerprint checks through the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the state police, according to the survey. While experts say many shortcomings remain in state background-check policies, that number is far greater than the handful of states that were performing checks 15 years ago.

Some states have also taken steps to curb the problem known as "passing the trash": the practice of allowing employees suspected of wrongdoing to leave quietly for new jobs, often to abuse more students. In the Education Week survey completed this year, 17 states reported that they required local school officials to inform the state if educators leave their jobs amid suspicions of sexual misconduct.

The same number of states said they had laws shielding school officials from defamation suits based on job references given for current or former employees. Such laws grow out of a fear that officials will face lawsuits if they are candid to prospective employers about questionable conduct by former staff members.

Seventeen is better than "zero", but that still means that less than half of the states require local officials to contact the state if sexual misconduct is found, and less than half give school officials enough protection to be able to tell other schools if a teacher is an abuser.

This is the first of a two-part series; I'll post a link to the next part as soon as it becomes available.

Acknowledging the problem of predatory

Acknowledging the problem of predatory teachers

After hundreds of incidences of sexual abuse by educators, state policymakers are finally beginning to pay attention. They're tightening many of the background check laws, but loopholes still exist that allow teachers who molest their students to slip away from the law:

In 42 states, applicants for state certification are required to undergo criminal-background screenings that involve fingerprint checks through the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the state police, according to the survey. While experts say many shortcomings remain in state background-check policies, that number is far greater than the handful of states that were performing checks 15 years ago.

Some states have also taken steps to curb the problem known as "passing the trash": the practice of allowing employees suspected of wrongdoing to leave quietly for new jobs, often to abuse more students. In the Education Week survey completed this year, 17 states reported that they required local school officials to inform the state if educators leave their jobs amid suspicions of sexual misconduct.

The same number of states said they had laws shielding school officials from defamation suits based on job references given for current or former employees. Such laws grow out of a fear that officials will face lawsuits if they are candid to prospective employers about questionable conduct by former staff members.

Seventeen is better than "zero", but that still means that less than half of the states require local officials to contact the state if sexual misconduct is found, and less than half give school officials enough protection to be able to tell other schools if a teacher is an abuser.

This is the first of a two-part series; I'll post a link to the next part as soon as it becomes available.

Acknowledging the problem of predatory

Acknowledging the problem of predatory teachers

After hundreds of incidences of sexual abuse by educators, state policymakers are finally beginning to pay attention. They're tightening many of the background check laws, but loopholes still exist that allow teachers who molest their students to slip away from the law:

In 42 states, applicants for state certification are required to undergo criminal-background screenings that involve fingerprint checks through the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the state police, according to the survey. While experts say many shortcomings remain in state background-check policies, that number is far greater than the handful of states that were performing checks 15 years ago.

Some states have also taken steps to curb the problem known as "passing the trash": the practice of allowing employees suspected of wrongdoing to leave quietly for new jobs, often to abuse more students. In the Education Week survey completed this year, 17 states reported that they required local school officials to inform the state if educators leave their jobs amid suspicions of sexual misconduct.

The same number of states said they had laws shielding school officials from defamation suits based on job references given for current or former employees. Such laws grow out of a fear that officials will face lawsuits if they are candid to prospective employers about questionable conduct by former staff members.

Seventeen is better than "zero", but that still means that less than half of the states require local officials to contact the state if sexual misconduct is found, and less than half give school officials enough protection to be able to tell other schools if a teacher is an abuser.

This is the first of a two-part series; I'll post a link to the next part as soon as it becomes available.

Raided!Breaking news - the Miami-Dade

Raided!

Breaking news - the Miami-Dade County's teacher' union was just raided by the Feds. Why? No one's talking.

The headquarters of Miami-Dade County's teachers' union were searched by the FBI and a public corruption task force Tuesday. Searchers scoured computers and documents and left with boxes of records.

According to the FBI, they served a sealed search warrant on the United Teachers of Dade headquarters.

When asked what they were looking for, the FBI issued a statement saying, "We served a sealed search warrant at the UTD. Because it is sealed, we will not comment any further."

Ooooo, scandal. Wonder what the search warrant was for?

Raided!Breaking news - the Miami-Dade

Raided!

Breaking news - the Miami-Dade County's teacher' union was just raided by the Feds. Why? No one's talking.

The headquarters of Miami-Dade County's teachers' union were searched by the FBI and a public corruption task force Tuesday. Searchers scoured computers and documents and left with boxes of records.

According to the FBI, they served a sealed search warrant on the United Teachers of Dade headquarters.

When asked what they were looking for, the FBI issued a statement saying, "We served a sealed search warrant at the UTD. Because it is sealed, we will not comment any further."

Ooooo, scandal. Wonder what the search warrant was for?

Raided!Breaking news - the Miami-Dade

Raided!

Breaking news - the Miami-Dade County's teacher' union was just raided by the Feds. Why? No one's talking.

The headquarters of Miami-Dade County's teachers' union were searched by the FBI and a public corruption task force Tuesday. Searchers scoured computers and documents and left with boxes of records.

According to the FBI, they served a sealed search warrant on the United Teachers of Dade headquarters.

When asked what they were looking for, the FBI issued a statement saying, "We served a sealed search warrant at the UTD. Because it is sealed, we will not comment any further."

Ooooo, scandal. Wonder what the search warrant was for?

Professors vs. PatriotismIs higher education

Professors vs. Patriotism

Is higher education incompatible with patriotism? That's the startling question posed by a recent symposium sponsored by the NAS. The symposium is detailed in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). A description of the symposium content follows:

The issue includes a symposium titled, "Is Higher Education Compatible With Patriotism," which is based on a conference held in May at the national conference of the National Association of Scholars. In her introduction to the symposium, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that since the 1960s, people both inside and outside the academy have become increasingly adversarial to "such bourgeois values as ... family, community, country."

All the while continuing to have their own families, become prominent in their own communities, and be supported by the taxpayers in their communities and their country. I suppose just because one is utterly dependent on "bourgeouis values," that's no reason not to condemn them.

Walter Berns, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, picks up that thread and traces it back to England. He writes that "what began in 19th-century Britain as a serious critique of the new liberal democracy became, in 20th-century America, a contemptuous 'bourgeois bashing,' almost a way of life for some of our campus radicals." He gives examples of people in academic circles who have an antipathy to shows of patriotism. After a Fourth of July celebration, Mr. Berns encountered "the wife of an economics professor" who, "when asked if she had enjoyed the fireworks, replied, 'Yes, but I could have done without all the flag-waving.'"

On a Fourth of July celebration, no less. Here's a tip - if you hate our flag, please stay inside during our patriotic holidays and do all the rest of us a favor, okay? Oh, and you get three guesses as to which economic models her husband espouses - and the first two don't count.

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, sees little conflict between higher education and patriotism, answering the symposium's question with "'Yes.' Yes, in thunder." He says that patriotism involves debate and clear reasoning, and that it includes asking provocative questions. "Patriotism," he observes, "is not obedience."

Yay, Todd - in thunder! He won a soft spot in my heart last fall with his brave essay denouncing the anti-war radicals - published in Mother Jones, no less. He's obviously unafraid to state outright the ideas that many in higher education either stupidly disbelieve or are too afraid to support.

In the final essay, William A. Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park School of Public Affairs, writes that he hopes "higher education can help foster a sober and moderate patriotism." This kind of patriotism, he says, involves "giving one's country the benefit of the doubt, exploring benign interpretations of controversial policies before concluding that more malign views are correct" but not "suspending critical judgment or withholding criticism."

The "more malign views" are, of course, the stock in trade for history professors who ignore the liberation of Iraq and focus on lost antiques, or Yale professors who organized a "teach-in" during the war that featured naked anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, or speech professors who force students to write anti-war letters to the President. None of these academics have the slightest interest in moderation, or in giving American the benefit of the doubt.

Luckily, the pendulum has begun to swing back, and college students are showing less interest in the radical politics of their professors:

[UC-Berkeley]senior faculty members here say the student population is not nearly as political or liberal as it once was.

"Compared to the 1960s," said Berkeley political science professor Henry E. Brady, "a lot of students these days are really more focused on finding a path into the system. There is no military draft now and no war, like Vietnam, going on and on and on. The experience of this generation is that war is brief with not many people killed -- certainly not anyone they know."

In September, Brady and a fellow political scientist, Merill Shanks, published a national survey showing that in many areas -- notably those involving religion and abortion -- today's college students are more conservative than their parents...

The difference is clear at the Free Speech Movement Café, an elegant coffee shop funded by a wealthy 1964 graduate at the base of the new Moffitt Undergraduate Library. One of the walls of the cafe is covered with an enlarged photograph of a Free Speech era sit-in. Almost all of the faces in the photo are white. Recent classes entering Berkeley, however, have been largely Asian, accounting for more than 40% of the entering freshman class.

"As a general rule," said [University Librarian Thomas] Leonard, "the increase in Asian Americans has pushed the student body more toward the center politically." In fact, Leonard said, opposition to the campus conservatives is more likely to come from the faculty or aging leftists in the surrounding community. "I get the sense the community is much more into protest than the campus," Leonard said. "There is a culture of protest in the Bay Area that is steadily getting grayer and older."

Wait, I thought the idea of "community" was too bourgeois for the faculty members. If they hate the community, and don't have the support of the students, who's left to listen to their twitty theories?

Professors vs. PatriotismIs higher education

Professors vs. Patriotism

Is higher education incompatible with patriotism? That's the startling question posed by a recent symposium sponsored by the NAS. The symposium is detailed in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). A description of the symposium content follows:

The issue includes a symposium titled, "Is Higher Education Compatible With Patriotism," which is based on a conference held in May at the national conference of the National Association of Scholars. In her introduction to the symposium, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that since the 1960s, people both inside and outside the academy have become increasingly adversarial to "such bourgeois values as ... family, community, country."

All the while continuing to have their own families, become prominent in their own communities, and be supported by the taxpayers in their communities and their country. I suppose just because one is utterly dependent on "bourgeouis values," that's no reason not to condemn them.

Walter Berns, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, picks up that thread and traces it back to England. He writes that "what began in 19th-century Britain as a serious critique of the new liberal democracy became, in 20th-century America, a contemptuous 'bourgeois bashing,' almost a way of life for some of our campus radicals." He gives examples of people in academic circles who have an antipathy to shows of patriotism. After a Fourth of July celebration, Mr. Berns encountered "the wife of an economics professor" who, "when asked if she had enjoyed the fireworks, replied, 'Yes, but I could have done without all the flag-waving.'"

On a Fourth of July celebration, no less. Here's a tip - if you hate our flag, please stay inside during our patriotic holidays and do all the rest of us a favor, okay? Oh, and you get three guesses as to which economic models her husband espouses - and the first two don't count.

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, sees little conflict between higher education and patriotism, answering the symposium's question with "'Yes.' Yes, in thunder." He says that patriotism involves debate and clear reasoning, and that it includes asking provocative questions. "Patriotism," he observes, "is not obedience."

Yay, Todd - in thunder! He won a soft spot in my heart last fall with his brave essay denouncing the anti-war radicals - published in Mother Jones, no less. He's obviously unafraid to state outright the ideas that many in higher education either stupidly disbelieve or are too afraid to support.

In the final essay, William A. Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park School of Public Affairs, writes that he hopes "higher education can help foster a sober and moderate patriotism." This kind of patriotism, he says, involves "giving one's country the benefit of the doubt, exploring benign interpretations of controversial policies before concluding that more malign views are correct" but not "suspending critical judgment or withholding criticism."

The "more malign views" are, of course, the stock in trade for history professors who ignore the liberation of Iraq and focus on lost antiques, or Yale professors who organized a "teach-in" during the war that featured naked anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, or speech professors who force students to write anti-war letters to the President. None of these academics have the slightest interest in moderation, or in giving American the benefit of the doubt.

Luckily, the pendulum has begun to swing back, and college students are showing less interest in the radical politics of their professors:

[UC-Berkeley]senior faculty members here say the student population is not nearly as political or liberal as it once was.

"Compared to the 1960s," said Berkeley political science professor Henry E. Brady, "a lot of students these days are really more focused on finding a path into the system. There is no military draft now and no war, like Vietnam, going on and on and on. The experience of this generation is that war is brief with not many people killed -- certainly not anyone they know."

In September, Brady and a fellow political scientist, Merill Shanks, published a national survey showing that in many areas -- notably those involving religion and abortion -- today's college students are more conservative than their parents...

The difference is clear at the Free Speech Movement Café, an elegant coffee shop funded by a wealthy 1964 graduate at the base of the new Moffitt Undergraduate Library. One of the walls of the cafe is covered with an enlarged photograph of a Free Speech era sit-in. Almost all of the faces in the photo are white. Recent classes entering Berkeley, however, have been largely Asian, accounting for more than 40% of the entering freshman class.

"As a general rule," said [University Librarian Thomas] Leonard, "the increase in Asian Americans has pushed the student body more toward the center politically." In fact, Leonard said, opposition to the campus conservatives is more likely to come from the faculty or aging leftists in the surrounding community. "I get the sense the community is much more into protest than the campus," Leonard said. "There is a culture of protest in the Bay Area that is steadily getting grayer and older."

Wait, I thought the idea of "community" was too bourgeois for the faculty members. If they hate the community, and don't have the support of the students, who's left to listen to their twitty theories?

Professors vs. PatriotismIs higher education

Professors vs. Patriotism

Is higher education incompatible with patriotism? That's the startling question posed by a recent symposium sponsored by the NAS. The symposium is detailed in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). A description of the symposium content follows:

The issue includes a symposium titled, "Is Higher Education Compatible With Patriotism," which is based on a conference held in May at the national conference of the National Association of Scholars. In her introduction to the symposium, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that since the 1960s, people both inside and outside the academy have become increasingly adversarial to "such bourgeois values as ... family, community, country."

All the while continuing to have their own families, become prominent in their own communities, and be supported by the taxpayers in their communities and their country. I suppose just because one is utterly dependent on "bourgeouis values," that's no reason not to condemn them.

Walter Berns, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, picks up that thread and traces it back to England. He writes that "what began in 19th-century Britain as a serious critique of the new liberal democracy became, in 20th-century America, a contemptuous 'bourgeois bashing,' almost a way of life for some of our campus radicals." He gives examples of people in academic circles who have an antipathy to shows of patriotism. After a Fourth of July celebration, Mr. Berns encountered "the wife of an economics professor" who, "when asked if she had enjoyed the fireworks, replied, 'Yes, but I could have done without all the flag-waving.'"

On a Fourth of July celebration, no less. Here's a tip - if you hate our flag, please stay inside during our patriotic holidays and do all the rest of us a favor, okay? Oh, and you get three guesses as to which economic models her husband espouses - and the first two don't count.

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, sees little conflict between higher education and patriotism, answering the symposium's question with "'Yes.' Yes, in thunder." He says that patriotism involves debate and clear reasoning, and that it includes asking provocative questions. "Patriotism," he observes, "is not obedience."

Yay, Todd - in thunder! He won a soft spot in my heart last fall with his brave essay denouncing the anti-war radicals - published in Mother Jones, no less. He's obviously unafraid to state outright the ideas that many in higher education either stupidly disbelieve or are too afraid to support.

In the final essay, William A. Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park School of Public Affairs, writes that he hopes "higher education can help foster a sober and moderate patriotism." This kind of patriotism, he says, involves "giving one's country the benefit of the doubt, exploring benign interpretations of controversial policies before concluding that more malign views are correct" but not "suspending critical judgment or withholding criticism."

The "more malign views" are, of course, the stock in trade for history professors who ignore the liberation of Iraq and focus on lost antiques, or Yale professors who organized a "teach-in" during the war that featured naked anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, or speech professors who force students to write anti-war letters to the President. None of these academics have the slightest interest in moderation, or in giving American the benefit of the doubt.

Luckily, the pendulum has begun to swing back, and college students are showing less interest in the radical politics of their professors:

[UC-Berkeley]senior faculty members here say the student population is not nearly as political or liberal as it once was.

"Compared to the 1960s," said Berkeley political science professor Henry E. Brady, "a lot of students these days are really more focused on finding a path into the system. There is no military draft now and no war, like Vietnam, going on and on and on. The experience of this generation is that war is brief with not many people killed -- certainly not anyone they know."

In September, Brady and a fellow political scientist, Merill Shanks, published a national survey showing that in many areas -- notably those involving religion and abortion -- today's college students are more conservative than their parents...

The difference is clear at the Free Speech Movement Café, an elegant coffee shop funded by a wealthy 1964 graduate at the base of the new Moffitt Undergraduate Library. One of the walls of the cafe is covered with an enlarged photograph of a Free Speech era sit-in. Almost all of the faces in the photo are white. Recent classes entering Berkeley, however, have been largely Asian, accounting for more than 40% of the entering freshman class.

"As a general rule," said [University Librarian Thomas] Leonard, "the increase in Asian Americans has pushed the student body more toward the center politically." In fact, Leonard said, opposition to the campus conservatives is more likely to come from the faculty or aging leftists in the surrounding community. "I get the sense the community is much more into protest than the campus," Leonard said. "There is a culture of protest in the Bay Area that is steadily getting grayer and older."

Wait, I thought the idea of "community" was too bourgeois for the faculty members. If they hate the community, and don't have the support of the students, who's left to listen to their twitty theories?

Opposition to lowered standardsThe Chronicle

Opposition to lowered standards

The Chronicle of Higher Education released their survey showing that, despite an affiinity for affirmative action, a majority of Americans oppose admitting minorities who have lower test scores than other applicants. This Washington Times articles cites a defense of AA by David Ward, president of the American Council on Education:

[David Ward] told the Chronicle that lack of public support for actual affirmative-action programs, such as Michigan's, comes from misunderstanding. "We just haven't done a good job at explaining ourselves in these areas," Mr. Ward said, particularly in the Michigan case, where undergraduate minority applicants are given a statistical advantage over whites if they meet the university's minimum admissions standards.

Actually, Mr. Ward, I think you've done a fine job of explaining it, which is why 64% of those surveyed oppose these types of double standards. The racism and unfairness in these standards is perfectly clear - no additional explanation needed.

Update: Discriminations has a lengthier post on this topic. Go and enjoy.

Opposition to lowered standardsThe Chronicle

Opposition to lowered standards

The Chronicle of Higher Education released their survey showing that, despite an affiinity for affirmative action, a majority of Americans oppose admitting minorities who have lower test scores than other applicants. This Washington Times articles cites a defense of AA by David Ward, president of the American Council on Education:

[David Ward] told the Chronicle that lack of public support for actual affirmative-action programs, such as Michigan's, comes from misunderstanding. "We just haven't done a good job at explaining ourselves in these areas," Mr. Ward said, particularly in the Michigan case, where undergraduate minority applicants are given a statistical advantage over whites if they meet the university's minimum admissions standards.

Actually, Mr. Ward, I think you've done a fine job of explaining it, which is why 64% of those surveyed oppose these types of double standards. The racism and unfairness in these standards is perfectly clear - no additional explanation needed.

Update: Discriminations has a lengthier post on this topic. Go and enjoy.

Opposition to lowered standardsThe Chronicle

Opposition to lowered standards

The Chronicle of Higher Education released their survey showing that, despite an affiinity for affirmative action, a majority of Americans oppose admitting minorities who have lower test scores than other applicants. This Washington Times articles cites a defense of AA by David Ward, president of the American Council on Education:

[David Ward] told the Chronicle that lack of public support for actual affirmative-action programs, such as Michigan's, comes from misunderstanding. "We just haven't done a good job at explaining ourselves in these areas," Mr. Ward said, particularly in the Michigan case, where undergraduate minority applicants are given a statistical advantage over whites if they meet the university's minimum admissions standards.

Actually, Mr. Ward, I think you've done a fine job of explaining it, which is why 64% of those surveyed oppose these types of double standards. The racism and unfairness in these standards is perfectly clear - no additional explanation needed.

Update: Discriminations has a lengthier post on this topic. Go and enjoy.

Updating the ol' blogrollYes, it's

Updating the ol' blogroll

Yes, it's definitely time to do some updating and organizing. If you take a peek at the left-hand side of the screen, I have revamped my blogroll by adding new blogs and reorganizing the ones who are there.

Here are some new blogs that I added:

Eject!Eject!Eject! - You should read everything Bill Whittle writes, but be forewarned. His postings are long, intense, educational - and extremely moving. He always makes me cry. I hate that. :)

Dean Esmay - A defender of the true liberal position. He's also one of the nicest people in the blogosphere.

Rachel Lucas - She's one of the toughest cookies around. I don't plan to ever disagree with her - at least, not publicly. Michael Moore has much to fear from this woman.

Sofia Sideshow - An American making films in Bulgaria and pithy comments about the culture shock. Surreal, fascinating, beautiful.

Enjoy.

Updating the ol' blogrollYes, it's

Updating the ol' blogroll

Yes, it's definitely time to do some updating and organizing. If you take a peek at the left-hand side of the screen, I have revamped my blogroll by adding new blogs and reorganizing the ones who are there.

Here are some new blogs that I added:

Eject!Eject!Eject! - You should read everything Bill Whittle writes, but be forewarned. His postings are long, intense, educational - and extremely moving. He always makes me cry. I hate that. :)

Dean Esmay - A defender of the true liberal position. He's also one of the nicest people in the blogosphere.

Rachel Lucas - She's one of the toughest cookies around. I don't plan to ever disagree with her - at least, not publicly. Michael Moore has much to fear from this woman.

Sofia Sideshow - An American making films in Bulgaria and pithy comments about the culture shock. Surreal, fascinating, beautiful.

Enjoy.

Updating the ol' blogrollYes, it's

Updating the ol' blogroll

Yes, it's definitely time to do some updating and organizing. If you take a peek at the left-hand side of the screen, I have revamped my blogroll by adding new blogs and reorganizing the ones who are there.

Here are some new blogs that I added:

Eject!Eject!Eject! - You should read everything Bill Whittle writes, but be forewarned. His postings are long, intense, educational - and extremely moving. He always makes me cry. I hate that. :)

Dean Esmay - A defender of the true liberal position. He's also one of the nicest people in the blogosphere.

Rachel Lucas - She's one of the toughest cookies around. I don't plan to ever disagree with her - at least, not publicly. Michael Moore has much to fear from this woman.

Sofia Sideshow - An American making films in Bulgaria and pithy comments about the culture shock. Surreal, fascinating, beautiful.

Enjoy.

Discussions of test biasJohn Rosenberg

Discussions of test bias

John Rosenberg of Discriminations has pointed me towards an interesting blog, the Kitchen Cabinet, and, specifically, a post about LSAT scores for various ethnic groups enrolled in Michigan's law school (scroll down to "Affirmative Action Numbers" if this link doesn't work). The blogger, Kate Malcolm, notes that out of 4,461 law school applicants who obtained a score of 165 or better on the LSAT, and who had a GPA of greater than 3.5, only 29 were black and 114 were Hispanic. While I find nothing wrong with her posting the numbers, I do take issue with how she has chosen to question the numbers.

She writes:

Is there a bias in the LSAT? What I would first like to know is how many black students with GPAs over 3.5 are scoring below 165 on the LSAT as compared to the overall number of law applicants with those numbers.

Nothing wrong at all with asking that question - but as I've pointed out before, that has absolutely NOTHING to do with test bias. Group mean differences, or differing score distributions among different ethnic groups, is NOT evidence of test bias. If fewer black students make LSAT scores above 165 than do members of other ethnic groups, this is NOT evidence of test bias.

Large-scale standardized admissions tests are, in general, not biased, because there are processes in place which remove items that show differential functioning. Differential item functioning, or DIF, is how psychometricians define bias, and DIF is defined as items that perform differently for examinees in different groups who are at the same level of overall ability. That last point is key, and if you want to read more about it, click here, or here, or here.

All large-scale admissions testing programs, including LSAC, review items for DIF, and items which show DIF are not administered (there are other ways to assess bias, and rest assured the testing companies produce research showing that these other methods also indicate no bias). The LSAT is not biased - but there are differences in the score distributions, meaning that certain subgroups of minority examinees do not, as a whole, do as well on the exam as the subgroup of white examinees.

Now, because the exam is used for admission to law school, the exam does have differential impact on those minority groups - but that is not bias, and that does not mean that the group differences are not "real". The reasons behind these differences are hotly debated, but the fact remains that these groups differences do exist, and they exist on an exam that measures the same constructs (analytical reasoning, reading comprehension, and logical reasoning) for each examinee, regardless of race.

Next point:

Is there a bias in GPAs? This would be a far more outrageous and endemic problem. Useful to this inquiry would be how many black students are scoring above 165 on the LSAT, but have a GPA below 3.5, as compared to the overall number of law applicants with those numbers. Richard Atkinson, the President of the U California system, sheds some potential light on this: The most recent study found that 30 percent of Asian American students in California and 13 percent of white students met UC eligibility requirements; the figure was a disheartening 4 percent for Latinos and 3 percent for African Americans.

Again, I don't think she's using the term "bias" correctly. Is she asking whether minority subgroups are less likely to earn high GPAs? Once again, group differences don't mean bias. For one thing, if there were a substantial number of minority students with LSAT scores above 165 but below 3.5, this simply identifies such students as "under-achievers." That's the term testing companies use for students who have the skills (as evidenced by the test scores), but who don't demonstrate those skills day-to-day by working hard in school and raising their GPA. It's a label, not an insult; I was one myself when I was in high school.

This sort of discrepancy could also be seen as evidence that minority kids who are smart are nonetheless stuck in boring schools or schools which do not adequately reward their achievements. I think that the theory of bias - that teachers are systematically reluctant to give high grades to minority students who do well - is far down the list in terms of possibilities.

Finally:

...are there simply fewer black students with high numbers applying to law school? If so, why? A starting point here would be how many black students with GPAs over 3.5 do not apply to law school…

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with her initial point. The problem is not that high scoring blacks do not apply to law school. The problem, according to LSAC's own data, is that relatively few black students are meeting the criteria of high-performing students. I agree with Kate entirely when she says, "29 black law applicants with high numbers tells me only one thing: something is wrong with the system." However, I feel that affirmative action does not fix "the system", which is why I do not support AA. The reforms need to begin at the college, high-school, or even kindergarden level, so that at-risk minority students can become better prepared for academic work.

Discussions of test biasJohn Rosenberg

Discussions of test bias

John Rosenberg of Discriminations has pointed me towards an interesting blog, the Kitchen Cabinet, and, specifically, a post about LSAT scores for various ethnic groups enrolled in Michigan's law school (scroll down to "Affirmative Action Numbers" if this link doesn't work). The blogger, Kate Malcolm, notes that out of 4,461 law school applicants who obtained a score of 165 or better on the LSAT, and who had a GPA of greater than 3.5, only 29 were black and 114 were Hispanic. While I find nothing wrong with her posting the numbers, I do take issue with how she has chosen to question the numbers.

She writes:

Is there a bias in the LSAT? What I would first like to know is how many black students with GPAs over 3.5 are scoring below 165 on the LSAT as compared to the overall number of law applicants with those numbers.

Nothing wrong at all with asking that question - but as I've pointed out before, that has absolutely NOTHING to do with test bias. Group mean differences, or differing score distributions among different ethnic groups, is NOT evidence of test bias. If fewer black students make LSAT scores above 165 than do members of other ethnic groups, this is NOT evidence of test bias.

Large-scale standardized admissions tests are, in general, not biased, because there are processes in place which remove items that show differential functioning. Differential item functioning, or DIF, is how psychometricians define bias, and DIF is defined as items that perform differently for examinees in different groups who are at the same level of overall ability. That last point is key, and if you want to read more about it, click here, or here, or here.

All large-scale admissions testing programs, including LSAC, review items for DIF, and items which show DIF are not administered (there are other ways to assess bias, and rest assured the testing companies produce research showing that these other methods also indicate no bias). The LSAT is not biased - but there are differences in the score distributions, meaning that certain subgroups of minority examinees do not, as a whole, do as well on the exam as the subgroup of white examinees.

Now, because the exam is used for admission to law school, the exam does have differential impact on those minority groups - but that is not bias, and that does not mean that the group differences are not "real". The reasons behind these differences are hotly debated, but the fact remains that these groups differences do exist, and they exist on an exam that measures the same constructs (analytical reasoning, reading comprehension, and logical reasoning) for each examinee, regardless of race.

Next point:

Is there a bias in GPAs? This would be a far more outrageous and endemic problem. Useful to this inquiry would be how many black students are scoring above 165 on the LSAT, but have a GPA below 3.5, as compared to the overall number of law applicants with those numbers. Richard Atkinson, the President of the U California system, sheds some potential light on this: The most recent study found that 30 percent of Asian American students in California and 13 percent of white students met UC eligibility requirements; the figure was a disheartening 4 percent for Latinos and 3 percent for African Americans.

Again, I don't think she's using the term "bias" correctly. Is she asking whether minority subgroups are less likely to earn high GPAs? Once again, group differences don't mean bias. For one thing, if there were a substantial number of minority students with LSAT scores above 165 but below 3.5, this simply identifies such students as "under-achievers." That's the term testing companies use for students who have the skills (as evidenced by the test scores), but who don't demonstrate those skills day-to-day by working hard in school and raising their GPA. It's a label, not an insult; I was one myself when I was in high school.

This sort of discrepancy could also be seen as evidence that minority kids who are smart are nonetheless stuck in boring schools or schools which do not adequately reward their achievements. I think that the theory of bias - that teachers are systematically reluctant to give high grades to minority students who do well - is far down the list in terms of possibilities.

Finally:

...are there simply fewer black students with high numbers applying to law school? If so, why? A starting point here would be how many black students with GPAs over 3.5 do not apply to law school…

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with her initial point. The problem is not that high scoring blacks do not apply to law school. The problem, according to LSAC's own data, is that relatively few black students are meeting the criteria of high-performing students. I agree with Kate entirely when she says, "29 black law applicants with high numbers tells me only one thing: something is wrong with the system." However, I feel that affirmative action does not fix "the system", which is why I do not support AA. The reforms need to begin at the college, high-school, or even kindergarden level, so that at-risk minority students can become better prepared for academic work.

Discussions of test biasJohn Rosenberg

Discussions of test bias

John Rosenberg of Discriminations has pointed me towards an interesting blog, the Kitchen Cabinet, and, specifically, a post about LSAT scores for various ethnic groups enrolled in Michigan's law school (scroll down to "Affirmative Action Numbers" if this link doesn't work). The blogger, Kate Malcolm, notes that out of 4,461 law school applicants who obtained a score of 165 or better on the LSAT, and who had a GPA of greater than 3.5, only 29 were black and 114 were Hispanic. While I find nothing wrong with her posting the numbers, I do take issue with how she has chosen to question the numbers.

She writes:

Is there a bias in the LSAT? What I would first like to know is how many black students with GPAs over 3.5 are scoring below 165 on the LSAT as compared to the overall number of law applicants with those numbers.

Nothing wrong at all with asking that question - but as I've pointed out before, that has absolutely NOTHING to do with test bias. Group mean differences, or differing score distributions among different ethnic groups, is NOT evidence of test bias. If fewer black students make LSAT scores above 165 than do members of other ethnic groups, this is NOT evidence of test bias.

Large-scale standardized admissions tests are, in general, not biased, because there are processes in place which remove items that show differential functioning. Differential item functioning, or DIF, is how psychometricians define bias, and DIF is defined as items that perform differently for examinees in different groups who are at the same level of overall ability. That last point is key, and if you want to read more about it, click here, or here, or here.

All large-scale admissions testing programs, including LSAC, review items for DIF, and items which show DIF are not administered (there are other ways to assess bias, and rest assured the testing companies produce research showing that these other methods also indicate no bias). The LSAT is not biased - but there are differences in the score distributions, meaning that certain subgroups of minority examinees do not, as a whole, do as well on the exam as the subgroup of white examinees.

Now, because the exam is used for admission to law school, the exam does have differential impact on those minority groups - but that is not bias, and that does not mean that the group differences are not "real". The reasons behind these differences are hotly debated, but the fact remains that these groups differences do exist, and they exist on an exam that measures the same constructs (analytical reasoning, reading comprehension, and logical reasoning) for each examinee, regardless of race.

Next point:

Is there a bias in GPAs? This would be a far more outrageous and endemic problem. Useful to this inquiry would be how many black students are scoring above 165 on the LSAT, but have a GPA below 3.5, as compared to the overall number of law applicants with those numbers. Richard Atkinson, the President of the U California system, sheds some potential light on this: The most recent study found that 30 percent of Asian American students in California and 13 percent of white students met UC eligibility requirements; the figure was a disheartening 4 percent for Latinos and 3 percent for African Americans.

Again, I don't think she's using the term "bias" correctly. Is she asking whether minority subgroups are less likely to earn high GPAs? Once again, group differences don't mean bias. For one thing, if there were a substantial number of minority students with LSAT scores above 165 but below 3.5, this simply identifies such students as "under-achievers." That's the term testing companies use for students who have the skills (as evidenced by the test scores), but who don't demonstrate those skills day-to-day by working hard in school and raising their GPA. It's a label, not an insult; I was one myself when I was in high school.

This sort of discrepancy could also be seen as evidence that minority kids who are smart are nonetheless stuck in boring schools or schools which do not adequately reward their achievements. I think that the theory of bias - that teachers are systematically reluctant to give high grades to minority students who do well - is far down the list in terms of possibilities.

Finally:

...are there simply fewer black students with high numbers applying to law school? If so, why? A starting point here would be how many black students with GPAs over 3.5 do not apply to law school…

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with her initial point. The problem is not that high scoring blacks do not apply to law school. The problem, according to LSAC's own data, is that relatively few black students are meeting the criteria of high-performing students. I agree with Kate entirely when she says, "29 black law applicants with high numbers tells me only one thing: something is wrong with the system." However, I feel that affirmative action does not fix "the system", which is why I do not support AA. The reforms need to begin at the college, high-school, or even kindergarden level, so that at-risk minority students can become better prepared for academic work.

The unbearable math skills of

The unbearable math skills of English teachers

One English teacher, to be precise. Ms. Erin Cougill, who teaches English at Central High School in Brooksville, FL, has flunked the mathematics part of the state's teacher certification test six times. One more failing grade, and she's out of a job. She claim to have a "math block," and some of her students are defending her.

It's true that her poor math skills don't necessarily relate to her ability to understanding and teaching English. Here are the test development specs for the Mathematics (grades 6-12) portion of the FTCE, which I assume is the section she cannot pass. It does contain some relatively high-level questions about trignometry and calculus - but according to this report, one only need answer 53% of the items correctly in order to pass.

So it's likely that Ms. Cougill is not just missing the tricky items, but also the more basic ones on geometry, algebraic equations and understanding basic mathematical terms and reasoning. The question is - should Ms. Cougill be relieved of her job teaching English? You be the judge...

The unbearable math skills of

The unbearable math skills of English teachers

One English teacher, to be precise. Ms. Erin Cougill, who teaches English at Central High School in Brooksville, FL, has flunked the mathematics part of the state's teacher certification test six times. One more failing grade, and she's out of a job. She claim to have a "math block," and some of her students are defending her.

It's true that her poor math skills don't necessarily relate to her ability to understanding and teaching English. Here are the test development specs for the Mathematics (grades 6-12) portion of the FTCE, which I assume is the section she cannot pass. It does contain some relatively high-level questions about trignometry and calculus - but according to this report, one only need answer 53% of the items correctly in order to pass.

So it's likely that Ms. Cougill is not just missing the tricky items, but also the more basic ones on geometry, algebraic equations and understanding basic mathematical terms and reasoning. The question is - should Ms. Cougill be relieved of her job teaching English? You be the judge...

The unbearable math skills of

The unbearable math skills of English teachers

One English teacher, to be precise. Ms. Erin Cougill, who teaches English at Central High School in Brooksville, FL, has flunked the mathematics part of the state's teacher certification test six times. One more failing grade, and she's out of a job. She claim to have a "math block," and some of her students are defending her.

It's true that her poor math skills don't necessarily relate to her ability to understanding and teaching English. Here are the test development specs for the Mathematics (grades 6-12) portion of the FTCE, which I assume is the section she cannot pass. It does contain some relatively high-level questions about trignometry and calculus - but according to this report, one only need answer 53% of the items correctly in order to pass.

So it's likely that Ms. Cougill is not just missing the tricky items, but also the more basic ones on geometry, algebraic equations and understanding basic mathematical terms and reasoning. The question is - should Ms. Cougill be relieved of her job teaching English? You be the judge...

Two out of three (r's)

Two out of three (r's) ain't bad?

With all the recent focus on Reading and 'Rithmatic, it looks like 'Riting skills are going down the tubes. Just how bad are the writing skills of today's public school students? And is it related to the reduced amount of time spent in the classroom learning to write? The NYT has the goods- or, rather, the "bads":

Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers. And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.

This sounds like a bad joke. I took AP classes, so I know I wasn't in the regular history and English classes - but we did nothing BUT write papers. How can you get out of high school without writing at least a book report in history class?

Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board. The commission's report asserts that writing is among the most important skills students can learn, that it is the mechanism through which they learn to connect the dots in their knowledge — and that it is now woefully ignored in most American schools...

...until recently the teaching of writing has been largely overlooked. That seems to be changing now. With everyone from employers to college professors expressing alarm about the dismal writing skills of most American students, there is a new urgency, and new energy, to upgrade the teaching of writing. Both of the major college-entrance exams, the SAT and the ACT, are being revised to include writing tests, and last year the College Board, which administers the SAT, created the National Commission on Writing to study the issue...

Further, a 2002 study of California college students found that most freshmen could not analyze arguments, synthesize information or write papers that were reasonably free of language errors.

That's just sad. It also explains some of the horror stories floating about of college freshmen who cannot pass remedial writing classes. Come to think of, students who cannot "analyze arguments" are going to be more likely to be seduced by illogical political propaganda, so this also explains the affinity of California's college students for extreme left-wing politics and some of the more boneheaded ideas that are floating around.

Two out of three (r's)

Two out of three (r's) ain't bad?

With all the recent focus on Reading and 'Rithmatic, it looks like 'Riting skills are going down the tubes. Just how bad are the writing skills of today's public school students? And is it related to the reduced amount of time spent in the classroom learning to write? The NYT has the goods- or, rather, the "bads":

Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers. And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.

This sounds like a bad joke. I took AP classes, so I know I wasn't in the regular history and English classes - but we did nothing BUT write papers. How can you get out of high school without writing at least a book report in history class?

Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board. The commission's report asserts that writing is among the most important skills students can learn, that it is the mechanism through which they learn to connect the dots in their knowledge — and that it is now woefully ignored in most American schools...

...until recently the teaching of writing has been largely overlooked. That seems to be changing now. With everyone from employers to college professors expressing alarm about the dismal writing skills of most American students, there is a new urgency, and new energy, to upgrade the teaching of writing. Both of the major college-entrance exams, the SAT and the ACT, are being revised to include writing tests, and last year the College Board, which administers the SAT, created the National Commission on Writing to study the issue...

Further, a 2002 study of California college students found that most freshmen could not analyze arguments, synthesize information or write papers that were reasonably free of language errors.

That's just sad. It also explains some of the horror stories floating about of college freshmen who cannot pass remedial writing classes. Come to think of, students who cannot "analyze arguments" are going to be more likely to be seduced by illogical political propaganda, so this also explains the affinity of California's college students for extreme left-wing politics and some of the more boneheaded ideas that are floating around.

Two out of three (r's)

Two out of three (r's) ain't bad?

With all the recent focus on Reading and 'Rithmatic, it looks like 'Riting skills are going down the tubes. Just how bad are the writing skills of today's public school students? And is it related to the reduced amount of time spent in the classroom learning to write? The NYT has the goods- or, rather, the "bads":

Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers. And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.

This sounds like a bad joke. I took AP classes, so I know I wasn't in the regular history and English classes - but we did nothing BUT write papers. How can you get out of high school without writing at least a book report in history class?

Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board. The commission's report asserts that writing is among the most important skills students can learn, that it is the mechanism through which they learn to connect the dots in their knowledge — and that it is now woefully ignored in most American schools...

...until recently the teaching of writing has been largely overlooked. That seems to be changing now. With everyone from employers to college professors expressing alarm about the dismal writing skills of most American students, there is a new urgency, and new energy, to upgrade the teaching of writing. Both of the major college-entrance exams, the SAT and the ACT, are being revised to include writing tests, and last year the College Board, which administers the SAT, created the National Commission on Writing to study the issue...

Further, a 2002 study of California college students found that most freshmen could not analyze arguments, synthesize information or write papers that were reasonably free of language errors.

That's just sad. It also explains some of the horror stories floating about of college freshmen who cannot pass remedial writing classes. Come to think of, students who cannot "analyze arguments" are going to be more likely to be seduced by illogical political propaganda, so this also explains the affinity of California's college students for extreme left-wing politics and some of the more boneheaded ideas that are floating around.

Better GPAs through lawsuits? NOT.Okay,

Better GPAs through lawsuits? NOT.

Okay, managed to squeeze out of my meetings. So here goes:

A West Virginia teen has failed in his attempt to have a B removed from his Riverside high school transcript. It seems his 4.466 GPA is not good enough, so he sued his local school board. What was at stake? Giving a speech at graduation - that's an honor reserved only for those students with GPAs greater than 4.5. How did the snafu begin?

Justin Knabb and his mother began pushing the school board to bump up his GPA a few months ago after realizing that he would be just short of the 4.5 GPA he needs to graduate with highest honors. They suggested that the school board round up his grade to the nearest tenth of a point or remove the mark he earned in a pre-algebra class he took in eighth grade from his high school transcript.

The school board refused to remove the mark, saying it has considered the pre-algebra class a high school class for five years. So Justin and Ruth Ann Knabb sued the school board. In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, they said the school board shouldn't be allowed to add the pre-algebra class to Justin Knabb's high school transcript because the Knabb family wasn't told it would count as a high school class.

Bloom rejected the argument, saying ignorance of the law doesn't qualify Justin Knabb for an exception from county policy.

Wonder what the title of Justin's speech would have been? "Know your laws"? "Don't get mad - get litiguous"? "GPA cutoffs are a limitation on free speech"? The mind boggles.

Better GPAs through lawsuits? NOT.Okay,

Better GPAs through lawsuits? NOT.

Okay, managed to squeeze out of my meetings. So here goes:

A West Virginia teen has failed in his attempt to have a B removed from his Riverside high school transcript. It seems his 4.466 GPA is not good enough, so he sued his local school board. What was at stake? Giving a speech at graduation - that's an honor reserved only for those students with GPAs greater than 4.5. How did the snafu begin?

Justin Knabb and his mother began pushing the school board to bump up his GPA a few months ago after realizing that he would be just short of the 4.5 GPA he needs to graduate with highest honors. They suggested that the school board round up his grade to the nearest tenth of a point or remove the mark he earned in a pre-algebra class he took in eighth grade from his high school transcript.

The school board refused to remove the mark, saying it has considered the pre-algebra class a high school class for five years. So Justin and Ruth Ann Knabb sued the school board. In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, they said the school board shouldn't be allowed to add the pre-algebra class to Justin Knabb's high school transcript because the Knabb family wasn't told it would count as a high school class.

Bloom rejected the argument, saying ignorance of the law doesn't qualify Justin Knabb for an exception from county policy.

Wonder what the title of Justin's speech would have been? "Know your laws"? "Don't get mad - get litiguous"? "GPA cutoffs are a limitation on free speech"? The mind boggles.

Better GPAs through lawsuits? NOT.Okay,

Better GPAs through lawsuits? NOT.

Okay, managed to squeeze out of my meetings. So here goes:

A West Virginia teen has failed in his attempt to have a B removed from his Riverside high school transcript. It seems his 4.466 GPA is not good enough, so he sued his local school board. What was at stake? Giving a speech at graduation - that's an honor reserved only for those students with GPAs greater than 4.5. How did the snafu begin?

Justin Knabb and his mother began pushing the school board to bump up his GPA a few months ago after realizing that he would be just short of the 4.5 GPA he needs to graduate with highest honors. They suggested that the school board round up his grade to the nearest tenth of a point or remove the mark he earned in a pre-algebra class he took in eighth grade from his high school transcript.

The school board refused to remove the mark, saying it has considered the pre-algebra class a high school class for five years. So Justin and Ruth Ann Knabb sued the school board. In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, they said the school board shouldn't be allowed to add the pre-algebra class to Justin Knabb's high school transcript because the Knabb family wasn't told it would count as a high school class.

Bloom rejected the argument, saying ignorance of the law doesn't qualify Justin Knabb for an exception from county policy.

Wonder what the title of Justin's speech would have been? "Know your laws"? "Don't get mad - get litiguous"? "GPA cutoffs are a limitation on free speech"? The mind boggles.

SwampedI came in at 7:30

Swamped

I came in at 7:30 this morning to get ready for a two-hour presentation at 8 am, and then I'm stuck in committee meetings all day. Tonight, we're having two friends over for dinner - an engaged couple who are prominent in the local Wiccan community, and who are also dead ringers for the Mel Gibson-Catherine McCormack couple in Braveheart. They're a great deal of fun, as you might imagine, and we'll be busy with them all evening.

So, I'm not sure if I'll get the chance to blog anything today. But here are the upcoming attractions, which will be posted tomorrow at the latest: Students who sue for higher GPA's, dismal writing skills in schools, and the unbearable math skills of English teachers.

See you soon.

SwampedI came in at 7:30

Swamped

I came in at 7:30 this morning to get ready for a two-hour presentation at 8 am, and then I'm stuck in committee meetings all day. Tonight, we're having two friends over for dinner - an engaged couple who are prominent in the local Wiccan community, and who are also dead ringers for the Mel Gibson-Catherine McCormack couple in Braveheart. They're a great deal of fun, as you might imagine, and we'll be busy with them all evening.

So, I'm not sure if I'll get the chance to blog anything today. But here are the upcoming attractions, which will be posted tomorrow at the latest: Students who sue for higher GPA's, dismal writing skills in schools, and the unbearable math skills of English teachers.

See you soon.

SwampedI came in at 7:30

Swamped

I came in at 7:30 this morning to get ready for a two-hour presentation at 8 am, and then I'm stuck in committee meetings all day. Tonight, we're having two friends over for dinner - an engaged couple who are prominent in the local Wiccan community, and who are also dead ringers for the Mel Gibson-Catherine McCormack couple in Braveheart. They're a great deal of fun, as you might imagine, and we'll be busy with them all evening.

So, I'm not sure if I'll get the chance to blog anything today. But here are the upcoming attractions, which will be posted tomorrow at the latest: Students who sue for higher GPA's, dismal writing skills in schools, and the unbearable math skills of English teachers.

See you soon.

Queering the schoolsThe City Journal

Queering the schools

The City Journal hits another one out of the park today with Marjorie King's "Queering the Schools." Few commentators are willing to be critical of programs run by advocacy groups such as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN), because they're afraid of being labeled intolerant, bigoted, or abusive. It's difficult to criticize these groups without seeming to be critical of homosexuals in general - but GLSEN is way past due for some honest criticism, if this report is to be believed:

For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K–12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include “role playing” exercises to “counter harassment,” where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; testing students to see where their attitudes lie toward sexual “difference” (mere tolerance is unacceptable; much better is “admiration” and, best of all, “nurturance”); getting students to take a “Sexual Orientation Quiz”; and having heterosexual students learn 37 ways that heterosexuals are privileged in society...

Where do I begin? For starters, given that teachers complain so much about how much time is needed to prepare for high-stakes exams, it seems like we could cut some of the fat right here with these invasive and insulting lesson plans and surveys. More time on reading, less time on role playing. More time on multiplication table drills, less time on quizzing them about sexual differences. What could be simpler?

We also need to bring back the idea that "mere tolerance" is indeed acceptable on a personal level. Any person should be free to think what they want about any other person; it's how they act that is important, not what their "attitudes" are. The suggestion that the only positive way to be is "admiring" or "nurturing" towards homosexuals falls in the realm of thought control, and that's without even getting into the fact that many parents may not wish for their kids to admire homosexuals. GLSEN may want everyone to, but they don't have the right to insist that of everyone.

GLSEN would like educators and parents to believe that the only way to reduce bullying against gay students is to force kids to think positively about homosexuality. They miss the point entirely with this theory, and Ms. King doesn't let that slide:

Gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country...the real problem is not anti-gay prejudice but the overall breakdown of school discipline. No child should have to put up with verbal or physical intimidation at school. Making schools safer, however, does not require importing a broader LGBT agenda that offends the values of many students and parents.

No, it requires teaching a child that he or she should respect everyone equally, regardless of what the child believes about other people's race, sex, sexuality, etc. Forcing a child to admire homosexuality is counter-productive, insulting, and may possibly lead to the very bullying that GLSEN wants to prevent, because the take-home message is, "You have to admire someone in order to treat them properly."

The correct lesson to teach children is, "Be respectful of others even if you don't like they way they look/act/talk/whatever." But of course, that would require real discipline in schools as opposed to trendy political propaganda like the ideas pushed by GLSEN. Groups like GLSEN promote the anti-rational attitude of many advocacy groups who would convince our children that how they feel is the only thing that matters, or that one cannot change one's behavior unless one has an "attitude adjustment" first.

Teaching real respect for all would also require GLSEN to promote tolerance of students who are proud of their heterosexuality, and as the case of Elliot Chambers shows, they have no intention of tolerating anyone who has the gall to be proud of themselves if they're not gay:

Belonging to a conservative family, Chambers decided one day to express his values and wore to school a sweatshirt with the words STRAIGHT PRIDE emblazoned across the front and an image of a man and woman holding hands on the back. The school principal found this expression of support for heterosexuality unacceptable. He forbade Chambers from wearing the sweatshirt in school, explaining that another student had found it offensive. Chambers’s parents, increasingly concerned about what they considered Woodbury’s aggressive endorsement of the LGBT agenda, met with the principal, who charged them with being “homophobic"...The parents then filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that the school had squelched their son’s First Amendment rights.

When a preliminary judgment came down in Chambers’s favor, the principal announced over the school public address system that the court had actually agreed with school officials that the sentiment of “straight pride” seemed intolerant toward homosexuality, and if circumstances changed so as to create “a reasonable belief that a substantial disruption of, or material interference with, school activities might ensue” from the wearing of the shirt, the school could prohibit it again. Foreseeing further disturbance, Mrs. Chambers decided to home-school her son.

Another point at which GLSEN stepped over the line is in their uncritical presentation of certain sexual activities:

A GLSEN-sponsored, taxpayer-funded “teach out” for activists, educators, and students to brainstorm ways of creating schools and communities that “are truly inclusive and safe,” held at Tufts University a while back, is a case in point. The daylong conference, with Massachusetts Department of Education and other state employees as workshop leaders and drawing many high school students and teachers (who received professional development credits for attending), featured a “youth only, ages 14–21” session that offered a lesson in “fisting”—the potentially dangerous act, called by some the first new sexual invention in 1,000 years, of inserting one’s fist into a partner’s anus or vagina.

Do you suppose they mentioned the greatly-increased risk of bleeding, scarring, and transmission of STDs that results from this practice? After all, any meaningful heterosexual sexual education course would include sections on pregnancy and male-to-female STD transmission rates - but I don't think GLSEN was going for "education" here.

Speaking of education, who do you think is supporting GLSEN?

No organization has been more steadfast in its support of GLSEN than the NEA. During the NEA’s annual convention in July 2001, many observers expected the teachers’ union to pass an official resolution incorporating GLSEN’s sweeping educational goals into K–12 curricula nationwide. As it turns out, the NEA, clearly trying to minimize public awareness of an unprecedented infringement on parental prerogatives, tabled the resolution and announced a task force to study how best to approach LGBT issues in the schools. But in February 2002, the NEA board of directors approved the task force’s report—a pure emanation of the GLSEN worldview, as is clear both from its numerous citations of GLSEN documents in the footnotes and from its recommendations.

Following the task force’s lead, the NEA will now struggle to expunge “heterosexism” from the consciousness of children in the classroom.

Well, if they're as successful at that task as they have been with teaching children to read and write as of late, I'd say we don't have that much to worry about. And in which state do you think this agenda has the strongest support?

The queering of the public schools has perhaps advanced furthest in California, where a new state law requires public schools to teach all K–12 students (and K means five-year-olds) “to appreciate various sexual orientations.” What the new law might mean in practice, warned a state assemblyman, was on display at Santa Rosa High School, where invited homosexual activists “talked about using cellophane during group sex and said that ‘clear is best because you can see what you want to lick,’ ” or at Hale Middle School in Los Angeles, where during an AIDS education course, “12-year-olds were subjected to graphic descriptions of anal sex and tips on how to dispose of used condoms so parents don’t find out.”

Oh, yeah, teaching 12-year-olds to ignore their parents' advice on sex and rely on condoms is a surefire way of slowing down the AIDS epidemic. Uh huh.

The queer theorists themselves claim to "oppose society," and public school indoctrination is where the subversiveness begins.

Queering the schoolsThe City Journal

Queering the schools

The City Journal hits another one out of the park today with Marjorie King's "Queering the Schools." Few commentators are willing to be critical of programs run by advocacy groups such as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN), because they're afraid of being labeled intolerant, bigoted, or abusive. It's difficult to criticize these groups without seeming to be critical of homosexuals in general - but GLSEN is way past due for some honest criticism, if this report is to be believed:

For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K–12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include “role playing” exercises to “counter harassment,” where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; testing students to see where their attitudes lie toward sexual “difference” (mere tolerance is unacceptable; much better is “admiration” and, best of all, “nurturance”); getting students to take a “Sexual Orientation Quiz”; and having heterosexual students learn 37 ways that heterosexuals are privileged in society...

Where do I begin? For starters, given that teachers complain so much about how much time is needed to prepare for high-stakes exams, it seems like we could cut some of the fat right here with these invasive and insulting lesson plans and surveys. More time on reading, less time on role playing. More time on multiplication table drills, less time on quizzing them about sexual differences. What could be simpler?

We also need to bring back the idea that "mere tolerance" is indeed acceptable on a personal level. Any person should be free to think what they want about any other person; it's how they act that is important, not what their "attitudes" are. The suggestion that the only positive way to be is "admiring" or "nurturing" towards homosexuals falls in the realm of thought control, and that's without even getting into the fact that many parents may not wish for their kids to admire homosexuals. GLSEN may want everyone to, but they don't have the right to insist that of everyone.

GLSEN would like educators and parents to believe that the only way to reduce bullying against gay students is to force kids to think positively about homosexuality. They miss the point entirely with this theory, and Ms. King doesn't let that slide:

Gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country...the real problem is not anti-gay prejudice but the overall breakdown of school discipline. No child should have to put up with verbal or physical intimidation at school. Making schools safer, however, does not require importing a broader LGBT agenda that offends the values of many students and parents.

No, it requires teaching a child that he or she should respect everyone equally, regardless of what the child believes about other people's race, sex, sexuality, etc. Forcing a child to admire homosexuality is counter-productive, insulting, and may possibly lead to the very bullying that GLSEN wants to prevent, because the take-home message is, "You have to admire someone in order to treat them properly."

The correct lesson to teach children is, "Be respectful of others even if you don't like they way they look/act/talk/whatever." But of course, that would require real discipline in schools as opposed to trendy political propaganda like the ideas pushed by GLSEN. Groups like GLSEN promote the anti-rational attitude of many advocacy groups who would convince our children that how they feel is the only thing that matters, or that one cannot change one's behavior unless one has an "attitude adjustment" first.

Teaching real respect for all would also require GLSEN to promote tolerance of students who are proud of their heterosexuality, and as the case of Elliot Chambers shows, they have no intention of tolerating anyone who has the gall to be proud of themselves if they're not gay:

Belonging to a conservative family, Chambers decided one day to express his values and wore to school a sweatshirt with the words STRAIGHT PRIDE emblazoned across the front and an image of a man and woman holding hands on the back. The school principal found this expression of support for heterosexuality unacceptable. He forbade Chambers from wearing the sweatshirt in school, explaining that another student had found it offensive. Chambers’s parents, increasingly concerned about what they considered Woodbury’s aggressive endorsement of the LGBT agenda, met with the principal, who charged them with being “homophobic"...The parents then filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that the school had squelched their son’s First Amendment rights.

When a preliminary judgment came down in Chambers’s favor, the principal announced over the school public address system that the court had actually agreed with school officials that the sentiment of “straight pride” seemed intolerant toward homosexuality, and if circumstances changed so as to create “a reasonable belief that a substantial disruption of, or material interference with, school activities might ensue” from the wearing of the shirt, the school could prohibit it again. Foreseeing further disturbance, Mrs. Chambers decided to home-school her son.

Another point at which GLSEN stepped over the line is in their uncritical presentation of certain sexual activities:

A GLSEN-sponsored, taxpayer-funded “teach out” for activists, educators, and students to brainstorm ways of creating schools and communities that “are truly inclusive and safe,” held at Tufts University a while back, is a case in point. The daylong conference, with Massachusetts Department of Education and other state employees as workshop leaders and drawing many high school students and teachers (who received professional development credits for attending), featured a “youth only, ages 14–21” session that offered a lesson in “fisting”—the potentially dangerous act, called by some the first new sexual invention in 1,000 years, of inserting one’s fist into a partner’s anus or vagina.

Do you suppose they mentioned the greatly-increased risk of bleeding, scarring, and transmission of STDs that results from this practice? After all, any meaningful heterosexual sexual education course would include sections on pregnancy and male-to-female STD transmission rates - but I don't think GLSEN was going for "education" here.

Speaking of education, who do you think is supporting GLSEN?

No organization has been more steadfast in its support of GLSEN than the NEA. During the NEA’s annual convention in July 2001, many observers expected the teachers’ union to pass an official resolution incorporating GLSEN’s sweeping educational goals into K–12 curricula nationwide. As it turns out, the NEA, clearly trying to minimize public awareness of an unprecedented infringement on parental prerogatives, tabled the resolution and announced a task force to study how best to approach LGBT issues in the schools. But in February 2002, the NEA board of directors approved the task force’s report—a pure emanation of the GLSEN worldview, as is clear both from its numerous citations of GLSEN documents in the footnotes and from its recommendations.

Following the task force’s lead, the NEA will now struggle to expunge “heterosexism” from the consciousness of children in the classroom.

Well, if they're as successful at that task as they have been with teaching children to read and write as of late, I'd say we don't have that much to worry about. And in which state do you think this agenda has the strongest support?

The queering of the public schools has perhaps advanced furthest in California, where a new state law requires public schools to teach all K–12 students (and K means five-year-olds) “to appreciate various sexual orientations.” What the new law might mean in practice, warned a state assemblyman, was on display at Santa Rosa High School, where invited homosexual activists “talked about using cellophane during group sex and said that ‘clear is best because you can see what you want to lick,’ ” or at Hale Middle School in Los Angeles, where during an AIDS education course, “12-year-olds were subjected to graphic descriptions of anal sex and tips on how to dispose of used condoms so parents don’t find out.”

Oh, yeah, teaching 12-year-olds to ignore their parents' advice on sex and rely on condoms is a surefire way of slowing down the AIDS epidemic. Uh huh.

The queer theorists themselves claim to "oppose society," and public school indoctrination is where the subversiveness begins.

Queering the schoolsThe City Journal

Queering the schools

The City Journal hits another one out of the park today with Marjorie King's "Queering the Schools." Few commentators are willing to be critical of programs run by advocacy groups such as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN), because they're afraid of being labeled intolerant, bigoted, or abusive. It's difficult to criticize these groups without seeming to be critical of homosexuals in general - but GLSEN is way past due for some honest criticism, if this report is to be believed:

For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K–12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include “role playing” exercises to “counter harassment,” where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; testing students to see where their attitudes lie toward sexual “difference” (mere tolerance is unacceptable; much better is “admiration” and, best of all, “nurturance”); getting students to take a “Sexual Orientation Quiz”; and having heterosexual students learn 37 ways that heterosexuals are privileged in society...

Where do I begin? For starters, given that teachers complain so much about how much time is needed to prepare for high-stakes exams, it seems like we could cut some of the fat right here with these invasive and insulting lesson plans and surveys. More time on reading, less time on role playing. More time on multiplication table drills, less time on quizzing them about sexual differences. What could be simpler?

We also need to bring back the idea that "mere tolerance" is indeed acceptable on a personal level. Any person should be free to think what they want about any other person; it's how they act that is important, not what their "attitudes" are. The suggestion that the only positive way to be is "admiring" or "nurturing" towards homosexuals falls in the realm of thought control, and that's without even getting into the fact that many parents may not wish for their kids to admire homosexuals. GLSEN may want everyone to, but they don't have the right to insist that of everyone.

GLSEN would like educators and parents to believe that the only way to reduce bullying against gay students is to force kids to think positively about homosexuality. They miss the point entirely with this theory, and Ms. King doesn't let that slide:

Gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country...the real problem is not anti-gay prejudice but the overall breakdown of school discipline. No child should have to put up with verbal or physical intimidation at school. Making schools safer, however, does not require importing a broader LGBT agenda that offends the values of many students and parents.

No, it requires teaching a child that he or she should respect everyone equally, regardless of what the child believes about other people's race, sex, sexuality, etc. Forcing a child to admire homosexuality is counter-productive, insulting, and may possibly lead to the very bullying that GLSEN wants to prevent, because the take-home message is, "You have to admire someone in order to treat them properly."

The correct lesson to teach children is, "Be respectful of others even if you don't like they way they look/act/talk/whatever." But of course, that would require real discipline in schools as opposed to trendy political propaganda like the ideas pushed by GLSEN. Groups like GLSEN promote the anti-rational attitude of many advocacy groups who would convince our children that how they feel is the only thing that matters, or that one cannot change one's behavior unless one has an "attitude adjustment" first.

Teaching real respect for all would also require GLSEN to promote tolerance of students who are proud of their heterosexuality, and as the case of Elliot Chambers shows, they have no intention of tolerating anyone who has the gall to be proud of themselves if they're not gay:

Belonging to a conservative family, Chambers decided one day to express his values and wore to school a sweatshirt with the words STRAIGHT PRIDE emblazoned across the front and an image of a man and woman holding hands on the back. The school principal found this expression of support for heterosexuality unacceptable. He forbade Chambers from wearing the sweatshirt in school, explaining that another student had found it offensive. Chambers’s parents, increasingly concerned about what they considered Woodbury’s aggressive endorsement of the LGBT agenda, met with the principal, who charged them with being “homophobic"...The parents then filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that the school had squelched their son’s First Amendment rights.

When a preliminary judgment came down in Chambers’s favor, the principal announced over the school public address system that the court had actually agreed with school officials that the sentiment of “straight pride” seemed intolerant toward homosexuality, and if circumstances changed so as to create “a reasonable belief that a substantial disruption of, or material interference with, school activities might ensue” from the wearing of the shirt, the school could prohibit it again. Foreseeing further disturbance, Mrs. Chambers decided to home-school her son.

Another point at which GLSEN stepped over the line is in their uncritical presentation of certain sexual activities:

A GLSEN-sponsored, taxpayer-funded “teach out” for activists, educators, and students to brainstorm ways of creating schools and communities that “are truly inclusive and safe,” held at Tufts University a while back, is a case in point. The daylong conference, with Massachusetts Department of Education and other state employees as workshop leaders and drawing many high school students and teachers (who received professional development credits for attending), featured a “youth only, ages 14–21” session that offered a lesson in “fisting”—the potentially dangerous act, called by some the first new sexual invention in 1,000 years, of inserting one’s fist into a partner’s anus or vagina.

Do you suppose they mentioned the greatly-increased risk of bleeding, scarring, and transmission of STDs that results from this practice? After all, any meaningful heterosexual sexual education course would include sections on pregnancy and male-to-female STD transmission rates - but I don't think GLSEN was going for "education" here.

Speaking of education, who do you think is supporting GLSEN?

No organization has been more steadfast in its support of GLSEN than the NEA. During the NEA’s annual convention in July 2001, many observers expected the teachers’ union to pass an official resolution incorporating GLSEN’s sweeping educational goals into K–12 curricula nationwide. As it turns out, the NEA, clearly trying to minimize public awareness of an unprecedented infringement on parental prerogatives, tabled the resolution and announced a task force to study how best to approach LGBT issues in the schools. But in February 2002, the NEA board of directors approved the task force’s report—a pure emanation of the GLSEN worldview, as is clear both from its numerous citations of GLSEN documents in the footnotes and from its recommendations.

Following the task force’s lead, the NEA will now struggle to expunge “heterosexism” from the consciousness of children in the classroom.

Well, if they're as successful at that task as they have been with teaching children to read and write as of late, I'd say we don't have that much to worry about. And in which state do you think this agenda has the strongest support?

The queering of the public schools has perhaps advanced furthest in California, where a new state law requires public schools to teach all K–12 students (and K means five-year-olds) “to appreciate various sexual orientations.” What the new law might mean in practice, warned a state assemblyman, was on display at Santa Rosa High School, where invited homosexual activists “talked about using cellophane during group sex and said that ‘clear is best because you can see what you want to lick,’ ” or at Hale Middle School in Los Angeles, where during an AIDS education course, “12-year-olds were subjected to graphic descriptions of anal sex and tips on how to dispose of used condoms so parents don’t find out.”

Oh, yeah, teaching 12-year-olds to ignore their parents' advice on sex and rely on condoms is a surefire way of slowing down the AIDS epidemic. Uh huh.

The queer theorists themselves claim to "oppose society," and public school indoctrination is where the subversiveness begins.

Bringing politics onto the school

Bringing politics onto the school grounds

The teacher unions are at it again. An assembly bill, AB 503 has been sponsored by Democrat (what else?) assemblywoman Christine Kehoe in San Diego, California (where else?) to "allow teacher unions and other school employee unions to use public schools for political campaigning directed at faculty members and other school employees". This sort of campaigning is currently illegal, and for good reason:

Teachers and other school employees should be free of political pressures at their taxpayer-funded workplace. Using school facilities and services to push political candidates or ballot measures violates schools' political neutrality. School facilities and services are paid for by taxpayers of all political persuasions.

Most people would agree that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for facilities and services that may be used explicitly to support candidates or ballot measures with which they may disagree. AB 503 would change all that.

It exempts school unions, and only the unions, from the current law . According to the Legislative Counsel, it would allow school employee organizations to use school "bulletin boards, mailboxes, and other means of communication" to urge the support or defeat of any ballot measure or candidate. The only caveat is that the political postings cannot be in areas of general public view. The implications are wide ranging.

Emphasis mine. The postings are forced to remain "out of public view," which means posters are out - but flyers, mailings, and emails will be just fine. Note that the school unions are not fighting for the right for all political groups to support candidates on campus. The unions want to keep that right all to themselves.

Bringing politics onto the school

Bringing politics onto the school grounds

The teacher unions are at it again. An assembly bill, AB 503 has been sponsored by Democrat (what else?) assemblywoman Christine Kehoe in San Diego, California (where else?) to "allow teacher unions and other school employee unions to use public schools for political campaigning directed at faculty members and other school employees". This sort of campaigning is currently illegal, and for good reason:

Teachers and other school employees should be free of political pressures at their taxpayer-funded workplace. Using school facilities and services to push political candidates or ballot measures violates schools' political neutrality. School facilities and services are paid for by taxpayers of all political persuasions.

Most people would agree that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for facilities and services that may be used explicitly to support candidates or ballot measures with which they may disagree. AB 503 would change all that.

It exempts school unions, and only the unions, from the current law . According to the Legislative Counsel, it would allow school employee organizations to use school "bulletin boards, mailboxes, and other means of communication" to urge the support or defeat of any ballot measure or candidate. The only caveat is that the political postings cannot be in areas of general public view. The implications are wide ranging.

Emphasis mine. The postings are forced to remain "out of public view," which means posters are out - but flyers, mailings, and emails will be just fine. Note that the school unions are not fighting for the right for all political groups to support candidates on campus. The unions want to keep that right all to themselves.

Bringing politics onto the school

Bringing politics onto the school grounds

The teacher unions are at it again. An assembly bill, AB 503 has been sponsored by Democrat (what else?) assemblywoman Christine Kehoe in San Diego, California (where else?) to "allow teacher unions and other school employee unions to use public schools for political campaigning directed at faculty members and other school employees". This sort of campaigning is currently illegal, and for good reason:

Teachers and other school employees should be free of political pressures at their taxpayer-funded workplace. Using school facilities and services to push political candidates or ballot measures violates schools' political neutrality. School facilities and services are paid for by taxpayers of all political persuasions.

Most people would agree that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for facilities and services that may be used explicitly to support candidates or ballot measures with which they may disagree. AB 503 would change all that.

It exempts school unions, and only the unions, from the current law . According to the Legislative Counsel, it would allow school employee organizations to use school "bulletin boards, mailboxes, and other means of communication" to urge the support or defeat of any ballot measure or candidate. The only caveat is that the political postings cannot be in areas of general public view. The implications are wide ranging.

Emphasis mine. The postings are forced to remain "out of public view," which means posters are out - but flyers, mailings, and emails will be just fine. Note that the school unions are not fighting for the right for all political groups to support candidates on campus. The unions want to keep that right all to themselves.

Did U of Michigan cook

Did U of Michigan cook the diversity books?

That's the claim made by Chetly Zarko (believe it or not, that's his real name) of Ann Arbor. He runs a website called The Czar's Court, and his exclusive report says that the U of M conducted a student survey several years ago, which showed that African American students felt stigmatized by affirmative action. The university apparently covered up these results, and their public position directly contradicts it, as does the research Michigan commissioned after litigation began. Chet believes the survey results negate the U of M's arguments that ethnic diversity is necessary for the campus atmosphere, and that affirmative action helps minority students. He says that the survey was originally "cleaned" before being released, and he's also suspicious about the fact that one of the authors of the study, U of M professor Gerald Gurin, is married to Patricia Gurin, who gave expert testimony supporting AA.

Valid claim, or crazy conspiracy theory? You be the judge:

Since the secret and contradictory report was written at Michigan before the lawsuits, by researchers and decision-makers heavily in favor of affirmative action, it poses a more significant challenge to the legitimacy of Michigan’s defense...

The MSS was commissioned in March 1990 shortly after Duderstadt became president and advanced his diversity and multicultural initiative known as the ‘Michigan Mandate.’ A sample of students from the 1990-91 freshman class were given a detailed survey of political and academic attitudes upon entering U-M and at the end of each year thereafter, until they left in 1994. The advantage of such a “time-series” study was that it allowed the researchers to draw conclusions as to how student attitudes evolved, as well as providing traditional snapshot data. The study sought to identify “students’ expectations, perceptions, and experiences with respect to diversity, [and] explored differences and commonalities among students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds in many other areas of their lives—their goals and expectations of college, experiences with faculty, interactions with fellow students and extracurricular involvement,” and a variety of other factors.

The report began by noting that the only real difference between racial groups involves the social and economic backgrounds from which students come to the university. African-American students have statistically fewer financial resources and their fathers have had less education. According to the report though, “in contrast to these large group differences in background, financial support and concerns, few group differences were found when we examined students’ general college expectations and orientations that are not directly focused on racial/ethnic diversity and multi-culturalism"...

Essentially, this affirms the counter-argument to diversity that individuals from different groups don’t necessarily ‘think’ differently. The idea of imposing racial/ethnic diversity upon a student population because it will expose them to a wider range of ideas depends implicitly upon the idea that we have less in common than we have in differences. Indeed, the writers of the report were astute enough to see a danger that the ‘diversity’ argument brings in potential divisiveness.

Where there were “some differences which, though relatively small,” the conclusions drawn actually support the opposition to racial preference programs. Quoting the report, “students of color, particularly African-American students, less often feel that they are respected academically, and that their work is appreciated and fairly graded. This supports the concern in the literature on minority students that they feel stigmatized and academically disregarded by faculty at predominantly white institutions.” <>Here, the bias of the authors is reflected in how carefully they point the blame of “stigmatization” to the “predominantly white [nature of the] institutions.” It must be pointed out though that race preferences, ‘diversity’ programs, and the ‘Michigan Mandate’ were in full force during the study. An equally plausible explanation for the minor ‘stigmatization’ felt by minorities is that the existence of racial preference in admissions influences both self-confidence and the faculty’s confidence in minority students. ”

Read the whole thing, and decide for yourself.

Did U of Michigan cook

Did U of Michigan cook the diversity books?

That's the claim made by Chetly Zarko (believe it or not, that's his real name) of Ann Arbor. He runs a website called The Czar's Court, and his exclusive report says that the U of M conducted a student survey several years ago, which showed that African American students felt stigmatized by affirmative action. The university apparently covered up these results, and their public position directly contradicts it, as does the research Michigan commissioned after litigation began. Chet believes the survey results negate the U of M's arguments that ethnic diversity is necessary for the campus atmosphere, and that affirmative action helps minority students. He says that the survey was originally "cleaned" before being released, and he's also suspicious about the fact that one of the authors of the study, U of M professor Gerald Gurin, is married to Patricia Gurin, who gave expert testimony supporting AA.

Valid claim, or crazy conspiracy theory? You be the judge:

Since the secret and contradictory report was written at Michigan before the lawsuits, by researchers and decision-makers heavily in favor of affirmative action, it poses a more significant challenge to the legitimacy of Michigan’s defense...

The MSS was commissioned in March 1990 shortly after Duderstadt became president and advanced his diversity and multicultural initiative known as the ‘Michigan Mandate.’ A sample of students from the 1990-91 freshman class were given a detailed survey of political and academic attitudes upon entering U-M and at the end of each year thereafter, until they left in 1994. The advantage of such a “time-series” study was that it allowed the researchers to draw conclusions as to how student attitudes evolved, as well as providing traditional snapshot data. The study sought to identify “students’ expectations, perceptions, and experiences with respect to diversity, [and] explored differences and commonalities among students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds in many other areas of their lives—their goals and expectations of college, experiences with faculty, interactions with fellow students and extracurricular involvement,” and a variety of other factors.

The report began by noting that the only real difference between racial groups involves the social and economic backgrounds from which students come to the university. African-American students have statistically fewer financial resources and their fathers have had less education. According to the report though, “in contrast to these large group differences in background, financial support and concerns, few group differences were found when we examined students’ general college expectations and orientations that are not directly focused on racial/ethnic diversity and multi-culturalism"...

Essentially, this affirms the counter-argument to diversity that individuals from different groups don’t necessarily ‘think’ differently. The idea of imposing racial/ethnic diversity upon a student population because it will expose them to a wider range of ideas depends implicitly upon the idea that we have less in common than we have in differences. Indeed, the writers of the report were astute enough to see a danger that the ‘diversity’ argument brings in potential divisiveness.

Where there were “some differences which, though relatively small,” the conclusions drawn actually support the opposition to racial preference programs. Quoting the report, “students of color, particularly African-American students, less often feel that they are respected academically, and that their work is appreciated and fairly graded. This supports the concern in the literature on minority students that they feel stigmatized and academically disregarded by faculty at predominantly white institutions.” <>Here, the bias of the authors is reflected in how carefully they point the blame of “stigmatization” to the “predominantly white [nature of the] institutions.” It must be pointed out though that race preferences, ‘diversity’ programs, and the ‘Michigan Mandate’ were in full force during the study. An equally plausible explanation for the minor ‘stigmatization’ felt by minorities is that the existence of racial preference in admissions influences both self-confidence and the faculty’s confidence in minority students. ”

Read the whole thing, and decide for yourself.

Did U of Michigan cook

Did U of Michigan cook the diversity books?

That's the claim made by Chetly Zarko (believe it or not, that's his real name) of Ann Arbor. He runs a website called The Czar's Court, and his exclusive report says that the U of M conducted a student survey several years ago, which showed that African American students felt stigmatized by affirmative action. The university apparently covered up these results, and their public position directly contradicts it, as does the research Michigan commissioned after litigation began. Chet believes the survey results negate the U of M's arguments that ethnic diversity is necessary for the campus atmosphere, and that affirmative action helps minority students. He says that the survey was originally "cleaned" before being released, and he's also suspicious about the fact that one of the authors of the study, U of M professor Gerald Gurin, is married to Patricia Gurin, who gave expert testimony supporting AA.

Valid claim, or crazy conspiracy theory? You be the judge:

Since the secret and contradictory report was written at Michigan before the lawsuits, by researchers and decision-makers heavily in favor of affirmative action, it poses a more significant challenge to the legitimacy of Michigan’s defense...

The MSS was commissioned in March 1990 shortly after Duderstadt became president and advanced his diversity and multicultural initiative known as the ‘Michigan Mandate.’ A sample of students from the 1990-91 freshman class were given a detailed survey of political and academic attitudes upon entering U-M and at the end of each year thereafter, until they left in 1994. The advantage of such a “time-series” study was that it allowed the researchers to draw conclusions as to how student attitudes evolved, as well as providing traditional snapshot data. The study sought to identify “students’ expectations, perceptions, and experiences with respect to diversity, [and] explored differences and commonalities among students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds in many other areas of their lives—their goals and expectations of college, experiences with faculty, interactions with fellow students and extracurricular involvement,” and a variety of other factors.

The report began by noting that the only real difference between racial groups involves the social and economic backgrounds from which students come to the university. African-American students have statistically fewer financial resources and their fathers have had less education. According to the report though, “in contrast to these large group differences in background, financial support and concerns, few group differences were found when we examined students’ general college expectations and orientations that are not directly focused on racial/ethnic diversity and multi-culturalism"...

Essentially, this affirms the counter-argument to diversity that individuals from different groups don’t necessarily ‘think’ differently. The idea of imposing racial/ethnic diversity upon a student population because it will expose them to a wider range of ideas depends implicitly upon the idea that we have less in common than we have in differences. Indeed, the writers of the report were astute enough to see a danger that the ‘diversity’ argument brings in potential divisiveness.

Where there were “some differences which, though relatively small,” the conclusions drawn actually support the opposition to racial preference programs. Quoting the report, “students of color, particularly African-American students, less often feel that they are respected academically, and that their work is appreciated and fairly graded. This supports the concern in the literature on minority students that they feel stigmatized and academically disregarded by faculty at predominantly white institutions.” <>Here, the bias of the authors is reflected in how carefully they point the blame of “stigmatization” to the “predominantly white [nature of the] institutions.” It must be pointed out though that race preferences, ‘diversity’ programs, and the ‘Michigan Mandate’ were in full force during the study. An equally plausible explanation for the minor ‘stigmatization’ felt by minorities is that the existence of racial preference in admissions influences both self-confidence and the faculty’s confidence in minority students. ”

Read the whole thing, and decide for yourself.

More support for high-stakes testsThe

More support for high-stakes tests

The NYT apparently thinks that new-found support for high-stakes exams means the educational "terrain" has just gotten more precarious. That's what their geologic analogy seems to indicate, anyway. Me, I see it as cause for celebration:

Two new studies make the case that do-or-die exams — which decide whether students graduate, teachers are dismissed or schools are shut in more than half the states in the nation — have brought about at least a modicum of academic progress, especially for minority students who may get scant attention otherwise.

The studies entirely contradict what some other scholars have found and are bound to feed an already fiery debate over the phenomenon known as high-stakes testing, a course of educational change that teachers resent, the Bush administration embraces and states are hurriedly adopting.

Glad that they noted that the debate is "already fiery", although testing critics will no doubt continue to repeat anti-testing myths as though they are facts, and not hotly-debated opinions (or complete fabrications).

Neither the authors nor their peers contend that the new research ends the dispute, given the many remaining open questions. But taken together, the studies appear to push the research pendulum away from critics who have argued that the fixation with make-or-break exams undermines teachers, stifles analytical learning and squeezes out struggling students, all without providing any clear benefits.

"If I were gambling on whether to put in a high-stakes system or not, I would put one in," said Martin Carnoy, the Stanford University professor who co-wrote one of the studies. "There's some probability I would be wrong. But if I were to put my money on something right now, I would try this."

In his study, published next month in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal, Mr. Carnoy and a colleague, Susanna Loeb, examined whether states with serious test consequences did better on a nationwide math assessment than their counterparts bearing none at all. While there seemed to be little to no difference in the performance of white students, the study found that the more consequences a state imposed, the better its minority students typically did.

In fact, for every additional layer of sanction or reward placed on schools, teachers and children, about 3.5 percent more black students and 3 to 4 percent more Latinos grasped the basics of eighth-grade math. The same pattern did not prove true for Latinos in math in the lower grades, but for black students it did, leading Mr. Carnoy to speculate that the threat of consequences may compel schools to demand more from students whom they may have otherwise written off.

Hooo, that's interesting. That result definitely supports those educators and activists who argue against "the soft bigotry of low expectations" for minority students.

No less importantly, the study found that do-or-die exams did not lead to more dropouts, as other researchers have argued. Still, there was no evidence that they improved graduation rates. "If that's not the aim, what is all this about?" asked Mr. Carnoy, whose study was financed by the federal government. "Why do we care about raising test scores if more people aren't going to finish high school and go on to college?"

Good point. Evidence suggesting that high-stakes tests don't cause more students to drop out is an important point, though, since that's one claim made by many testing critics. Ultimately, though, we'd hope the tests would improve the graduation rates as well, which means there may be other factors affecting these rates that are too strong to be counter-balanced by testing.

The second piece of work cited in this article is the same Raymond & Hanushek study that I reviewed earlier this month.

The NYT does warn us that correlation isn't causation, and that we can't necessarily attribute these results to the test. However, these results are a strong rebuttal to those who claimed that high stakes would cause minority students to drop out more, or would cause students to actually learn less. Proving a causal link may indeed never be possible, but disproving a causal link - i.e., showing that we don't negatively affect learning by using high-stakes tests - is well within the realm of possibility.

More support for high-stakes testsThe

More support for high-stakes tests

The NYT apparently thinks that new-found support for high-stakes exams means the educational "terrain" has just gotten more precarious. That's what their geologic analogy seems to indicate, anyway. Me, I see it as cause for celebration:

Two new studies make the case that do-or-die exams — which decide whether students graduate, teachers are dismissed or schools are shut in more than half the states in the nation — have brought about at least a modicum of academic progress, especially for minority students who may get scant attention otherwise.

The studies entirely contradict what some other scholars have found and are bound to feed an already fiery debate over the phenomenon known as high-stakes testing, a course of educational change that teachers resent, the Bush administration embraces and states are hurriedly adopting.

Glad that they noted that the debate is "already fiery", although testing critics will no doubt continue to repeat anti-testing myths as though they are facts, and not hotly-debated opinions (or complete fabrications).

Neither the authors nor their peers contend that the new research ends the dispute, given the many remaining open questions. But taken together, the studies appear to push the research pendulum away from critics who have argued that the fixation with make-or-break exams undermines teachers, stifles analytical learning and squeezes out struggling students, all without providing any clear benefits.

"If I were gambling on whether to put in a high-stakes system or not, I would put one in," said Martin Carnoy, the Stanford University professor who co-wrote one of the studies. "There's some probability I would be wrong. But if I were to put my money on something right now, I would try this."

In his study, published next month in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal, Mr. Carnoy and a colleague, Susanna Loeb, examined whether states with serious test consequences did better on a nationwide math assessment than their counterparts bearing none at all. While there seemed to be little to no difference in the performance of white students, the study found that the more consequences a state imposed, the better its minority students typically did.

In fact, for every additional layer of sanction or reward placed on schools, teachers and children, about 3.5 percent more black students and 3 to 4 percent more Latinos grasped the basics of eighth-grade math. The same pattern did not prove true for Latinos in math in the lower grades, but for black students it did, leading Mr. Carnoy to speculate that the threat of consequences may compel schools to demand more from students whom they may have otherwise written off.

Hooo, that's interesting. That result definitely supports those educators and activists who argue against "the soft bigotry of low expectations" for minority students.

No less importantly, the study found that do-or-die exams did not lead to more dropouts, as other researchers have argued. Still, there was no evidence that they improved graduation rates. "If that's not the aim, what is all this about?" asked Mr. Carnoy, whose study was financed by the federal government. "Why do we care about raising test scores if more people aren't going to finish high school and go on to college?"

Good point. Evidence suggesting that high-stakes tests don't cause more students to drop out is an important point, though, since that's one claim made by many testing critics. Ultimately, though, we'd hope the tests would improve the graduation rates as well, which means there may be other factors affecting these rates that are too strong to be counter-balanced by testing.

The second piece of work cited in this article is the same Raymond & Hanushek study that I reviewed earlier this month.

The NYT does warn us that correlation isn't causation, and that we can't necessarily attribute these results to the test. However, these results are a strong rebuttal to those who claimed that high stakes would cause minority students to drop out more, or would cause students to actually learn less. Proving a causal link may indeed never be possible, but disproving a causal link - i.e., showing that we don't negatively affect learning by using high-stakes tests - is well within the realm of possibility.

More support for high-stakes testsThe

More support for high-stakes tests

The NYT apparently thinks that new-found support for high-stakes exams means the educational "terrain" has just gotten more precarious. That's what their geologic analogy seems to indicate, anyway. Me, I see it as cause for celebration:

Two new studies make the case that do-or-die exams — which decide whether students graduate, teachers are dismissed or schools are shut in more than half the states in the nation — have brought about at least a modicum of academic progress, especially for minority students who may get scant attention otherwise.

The studies entirely contradict what some other scholars have found and are bound to feed an already fiery debate over the phenomenon known as high-stakes testing, a course of educational change that teachers resent, the Bush administration embraces and states are hurriedly adopting.

Glad that they noted that the debate is "already fiery", although testing critics will no doubt continue to repeat anti-testing myths as though they are facts, and not hotly-debated opinions (or complete fabrications).

Neither the authors nor their peers contend that the new research ends the dispute, given the many remaining open questions. But taken together, the studies appear to push the research pendulum away from critics who have argued that the fixation with make-or-break exams undermines teachers, stifles analytical learning and squeezes out struggling students, all without providing any clear benefits.

"If I were gambling on whether to put in a high-stakes system or not, I would put one in," said Martin Carnoy, the Stanford University professor who co-wrote one of the studies. "There's some probability I would be wrong. But if I were to put my money on something right now, I would try this."

In his study, published next month in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal, Mr. Carnoy and a colleague, Susanna Loeb, examined whether states with serious test consequences did better on a nationwide math assessment than their counterparts bearing none at all. While there seemed to be little to no difference in the performance of white students, the study found that the more consequences a state imposed, the better its minority students typically did.

In fact, for every additional layer of sanction or reward placed on schools, teachers and children, about 3.5 percent more black students and 3 to 4 percent more Latinos grasped the basics of eighth-grade math. The same pattern did not prove true for Latinos in math in the lower grades, but for black students it did, leading Mr. Carnoy to speculate that the threat of consequences may compel schools to demand more from students whom they may have otherwise written off.

Hooo, that's interesting. That result definitely supports those educators and activists who argue against "the soft bigotry of low expectations" for minority students.

No less importantly, the study found that do-or-die exams did not lead to more dropouts, as other researchers have argued. Still, there was no evidence that they improved graduation rates. "If that's not the aim, what is all this about?" asked Mr. Carnoy, whose study was financed by the federal government. "Why do we care about raising test scores if more people aren't going to finish high school and go on to college?"

Good point. Evidence suggesting that high-stakes tests don't cause more students to drop out is an important point, though, since that's one claim made by many testing critics. Ultimately, though, we'd hope the tests would improve the graduation rates as well, which means there may be other factors affecting these rates that are too strong to be counter-balanced by testing.

The second piece of work cited in this article is the same Raymond & Hanushek study that I reviewed earlier this month.

The NYT does warn us that correlation isn't causation, and that we can't necessarily attribute these results to the test. However, these results are a strong rebuttal to those who claimed that high stakes would cause minority students to drop out more, or would cause students to actually learn less. Proving a causal link may indeed never be possible, but disproving a causal link - i.e., showing that we don't negatively affect learning by using high-stakes tests - is well within the realm of possibility.

Fake self-esteemDo school programs designed

Fake self-esteem

Do school programs designed to raise self-esteem help kids perform better in school? Not at all, according to this (subscription-only) report in the Wall Street Journal. The Cranky Hermit posted an excerpt from the WSJ article (you can read original study here) :

Now, the most exhaustive study ever finds that programs to raise self-esteem fall woefully, even comically, short.

In the case of the struggling students, the likely reason the self-esteem intervention backfired speaks volumes. Students work hard partly because it helps them do better academically; 95s feel better than 65s. But "an intervention that encourages them to feel good about themselves regardless of work may remove the reason to work hard -- resulting in poorer performance," suggest psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues in a monograph to be published next month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. (The four were tapped by the American Psychological Society to undertake the study.) If you get to feel good without learning Maxwell's equations or the causes of the Korean War, why bother?

It isn't just school performance. From the 200-plus studies they analyzed, the APS group found no evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) results in better job performance, lowered aggression or reduced delinquency. And "high self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex," it concluded.

Some consider the self-esteem that is pushed by school programs to be "fake", in that it encourages the student to develop a sense of high-self importance unrelated to accomplishments. This type of self-esteem is notoriously fragile - in fact, it's one of the core concepts of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder. Dr. Helen Smith (otherwise known as the Instawife on Instapundit) has done a great deal of research with violent youth and has discovered that narcissistic egotism is one of the primary motivating factors of schoolyard killers. Narcissists have inflated self-esteem - "grandiosity" - that has little basis in reality. Because their self-image is so high, yet so fragile, they must constantly guard against criticism (or any sort of assessment) and often lash out against others who judge them. Another defining components of narcissists is that they refuse to acknowledge the rights of others. "Self-esteem" programs that encourage the student to focus only on himself or herself, to the exclusion of learning the importance of helping others, may possibly contribute to a reduced sense of respect for others.

This is not to say that school programs designed to boost self-esteem are guaranteed to create little narcissists. It's just that the simplistic definition of "self-esteem" touted in so many school programs is consistent with the inflated self-esteem found in the pathologically narcissistic.

Fake self-esteemDo school programs designed

Fake self-esteem

Do school programs designed to raise self-esteem help kids perform better in school? Not at all, according to this (subscription-only) report in the Wall Street Journal. The Cranky Hermit posted an excerpt from the WSJ article (you can read original study here) :

Now, the most exhaustive study ever finds that programs to raise self-esteem fall woefully, even comically, short.

In the case of the struggling students, the likely reason the self-esteem intervention backfired speaks volumes. Students work hard partly because it helps them do better academically; 95s feel better than 65s. But "an intervention that encourages them to feel good about themselves regardless of work may remove the reason to work hard -- resulting in poorer performance," suggest psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues in a monograph to be published next month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. (The four were tapped by the American Psychological Society to undertake the study.) If you get to feel good without learning Maxwell's equations or the causes of the Korean War, why bother?

It isn't just school performance. From the 200-plus studies they analyzed, the APS group found no evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) results in better job performance, lowered aggression or reduced delinquency. And "high self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex," it concluded.

Some consider the self-esteem that is pushed by school programs to be "fake", in that it encourages the student to develop a sense of high-self importance unrelated to accomplishments. This type of self-esteem is notoriously fragile - in fact, it's one of the core concepts of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder. Dr. Helen Smith (otherwise known as the Instawife on Instapundit) has done a great deal of research with violent youth and has discovered that narcissistic egotism is one of the primary motivating factors of schoolyard killers. Narcissists have inflated self-esteem - "grandiosity" - that has little basis in reality. Because their self-image is so high, yet so fragile, they must constantly guard against criticism (or any sort of assessment) and often lash out against others who judge them. Another defining components of narcissists is that they refuse to acknowledge the rights of others. "Self-esteem" programs that encourage the student to focus only on himself or herself, to the exclusion of learning the importance of helping others, may possibly contribute to a reduced sense of respect for others.

This is not to say that school programs designed to boost self-esteem are guaranteed to create little narcissists. It's just that the simplistic definition of "self-esteem" touted in so many school programs is consistent with the inflated self-esteem found in the pathologically narcissistic.

Fake self-esteemDo school programs designed

Fake self-esteem

Do school programs designed to raise self-esteem help kids perform better in school? Not at all, according to this (subscription-only) report in the Wall Street Journal. The Cranky Hermit posted an excerpt from the WSJ article (you can read original study here) :

Now, the most exhaustive study ever finds that programs to raise self-esteem fall woefully, even comically, short.

In the case of the struggling students, the likely reason the self-esteem intervention backfired speaks volumes. Students work hard partly because it helps them do better academically; 95s feel better than 65s. But "an intervention that encourages them to feel good about themselves regardless of work may remove the reason to work hard -- resulting in poorer performance," suggest psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues in a monograph to be published next month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. (The four were tapped by the American Psychological Society to undertake the study.) If you get to feel good without learning Maxwell's equations or the causes of the Korean War, why bother?

It isn't just school performance. From the 200-plus studies they analyzed, the APS group found no evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) results in better job performance, lowered aggression or reduced delinquency. And "high self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex," it concluded.

Some consider the self-esteem that is pushed by school programs to be "fake", in that it encourages the student to develop a sense of high-self importance unrelated to accomplishments. This type of self-esteem is notoriously fragile - in fact, it's one of the core concepts of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder. Dr. Helen Smith (otherwise known as the Instawife on Instapundit) has done a great deal of research with violent youth and has discovered that narcissistic egotism is one of the primary motivating factors of schoolyard killers. Narcissists have inflated self-esteem - "grandiosity" - that has little basis in reality. Because their self-image is so high, yet so fragile, they must constantly guard against criticism (or any sort of assessment) and often lash out against others who judge them. Another defining components of narcissists is that they refuse to acknowledge the rights of others. "Self-esteem" programs that encourage the student to focus only on himself or herself, to the exclusion of learning the importance of helping others, may possibly contribute to a reduced sense of respect for others.

This is not to say that school programs designed to boost self-esteem are guaranteed to create little narcissists. It's just that the simplistic definition of "self-esteem" touted in so many school programs is consistent with the inflated self-esteem found in the pathologically narcissistic.

Take a surveyYou are all

Take a survey

You are all cordially invited to take a "Fairness in Testing" survey. This survey is being used by a graduate student at the Teachers College at the University of Nebraska.

I have excerpted the IRB here:

You have been invited to participate in a research project that will anonymously study how individuals make judgments concerning the fairness of standardized testing in educational settings. You have been invited to participate in this study because as a measurement professional, your insight into policy issues associated with standardized testing is particularly valuable. You must be 19 years of age or older in order to participate in this research project. This project is being conducted by Kristin Yates, a graduate student in the Department of Educational Psychology and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The use of human subjects in this project has been approved by the UNL Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research Studies. Please read the following statements carefully. If you understand them and agree to participate, please click on the link at the bottom to indicate your consent and go to the first screen of the survey.

I realize most of you are not measurement professionals (though some of you have commented on here enough to have lost your amateur status), but I sent a link to this blog to Kristin after taking the survey myself, and she gave me permission to post a link to the survey for you guys. I encourage all of you (who are over 19, that is) to participate.

Click here to enter the survey.

Take a surveyYou are all

Take a survey

You are all cordially invited to take a "Fairness in Testing" survey. This survey is being used by a graduate student at the Teachers College at the University of Nebraska.

I have excerpted the IRB here:

You have been invited to participate in a research project that will anonymously study how individuals make judgments concerning the fairness of standardized testing in educational settings. You have been invited to participate in this study because as a measurement professional, your insight into policy issues associated with standardized testing is particularly valuable. You must be 19 years of age or older in order to participate in this research project. This project is being conducted by Kristin Yates, a graduate student in the Department of Educational Psychology and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The use of human subjects in this project has been approved by the UNL Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research Studies. Please read the following statements carefully. If you understand them and agree to participate, please click on the link at the bottom to indicate your consent and go to the first screen of the survey.

I realize most of you are not measurement professionals (though some of you have commented on here enough to have lost your amateur status), but I sent a link to this blog to Kristin after taking the survey myself, and she gave me permission to post a link to the survey for you guys. I encourage all of you (who are over 19, that is) to participate.

Click here to enter the survey.

Take a surveyYou are all

Take a survey

You are all cordially invited to take a "Fairness in Testing" survey. This survey is being used by a graduate student at the Teachers College at the University of Nebraska.

I have excerpted the IRB here:

You have been invited to participate in a research project that will anonymously study how individuals make judgments concerning the fairness of standardized testing in educational settings. You have been invited to participate in this study because as a measurement professional, your insight into policy issues associated with standardized testing is particularly valuable. You must be 19 years of age or older in order to participate in this research project. This project is being conducted by Kristin Yates, a graduate student in the Department of Educational Psychology and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The use of human subjects in this project has been approved by the UNL Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research Studies. Please read the following statements carefully. If you understand them and agree to participate, please click on the link at the bottom to indicate your consent and go to the first screen of the survey.

I realize most of you are not measurement professionals (though some of you have commented on here enough to have lost your amateur status), but I sent a link to this blog to Kristin after taking the survey myself, and she gave me permission to post a link to the survey for you guys. I encourage all of you (who are over 19, that is) to participate.

Click here to enter the survey.

Much ado about nothingFor all

Much ado about nothing

For all the "furor" unleashed over the linking of student promotion to performance on the Gateway exam in Georgia's public schools, not one student has been denied a diploma based on test results. Most students pass it on the first try. Predictably, the warnings of mass flunkings and the perils of judging students by one test scores have given way to complains that the test is too, well, easy:

So far, no high school student has been denied a diploma. And since its inception, system records show nine out of 10 elementary and middle school students have passed all sections of the exam on their first try...This school year, only 250 students out of 15,000 test-takers fell into the net of a transition class, in which teachers straddle the curricula of two grades with the goal of reuniting students with their peers. Nearly all who have been placed in transition classes succeed....

Donna Phillips, whose oldest son brought home failing and near-failing grades on several report cards as a seventh-grader, said he was promoted to the eighth grade because he passed Gateway. At her insistence, he repeated eighth grade the following year. "They were going to send him on to summer school. I had to have a fit basically to hold him back," she said. Now her youngest son has brazenly told her he doesn't have to do well in his classes, he just has to pass the exam. "Gateway needs to be more complete," Phillips said. "It's way too easy for them to pass. It's that, or the rest of the school year is worthless."

However, the rules in place for Gateway scores have apparently been inconsistent:

Some teachers have complained that the standards for promotion are a moving target. In fact, the rules have changed since the program began. The original passing threshold recommended by teachers was lowered in math, science and social studies after the school system projected it would have too many students in summer school, [Executive director of student assessment Linda] Mitchell said.

The passing scores were raised slowly, and by next spring the original scores recommended by teachers will take effect in all subject areas. Last spring, students passed the math portion of the seventh-grade test if they reached a score of 445 on a scale of 300 to 800. Ninety-six percent did.

Is anyone surprised that when a test is used for promotion purposes, everyone raises such a fuss that the passing scores are dropped? A score of 445 is not that high, not when the bottom is 300. The idea of gradually changing the passing score isn't bad, except that it might be seen as unfair and confusing to hold students from different years to different standards. Overall, though, it looks like Georgia is unwilling to set a meaningfully-difficult passing score for the exam, which makes the exam virtually worthless for promotion purposes.

Much ado about nothingFor all

Much ado about nothing

For all the "furor" unleashed over the linking of student promotion to performance on the Gateway exam in Georgia's public schools, not one student has been denied a diploma based on test results. Most students pass it on the first try. Predictably, the warnings of mass flunkings and the perils of judging students by one test scores have given way to complains that the test is too, well, easy:

So far, no high school student has been denied a diploma. And since its inception, system records show nine out of 10 elementary and middle school students have passed all sections of the exam on their first try...This school year, only 250 students out of 15,000 test-takers fell into the net of a transition class, in which teachers straddle the curricula of two grades with the goal of reuniting students with their peers. Nearly all who have been placed in transition classes succeed....

Donna Phillips, whose oldest son brought home failing and near-failing grades on several report cards as a seventh-grader, said he was promoted to the eighth grade because he passed Gateway. At her insistence, he repeated eighth grade the following year. "They were going to send him on to summer school. I had to have a fit basically to hold him back," she said. Now her youngest son has brazenly told her he doesn't have to do well in his classes, he just has to pass the exam. "Gateway needs to be more complete," Phillips said. "It's way too easy for them to pass. It's that, or the rest of the school year is worthless."

However, the rules in place for Gateway scores have apparently been inconsistent:

Some teachers have complained that the standards for promotion are a moving target. In fact, the rules have changed since the program began. The original passing threshold recommended by teachers was lowered in math, science and social studies after the school system projected it would have too many students in summer school, [Executive director of student assessment Linda] Mitchell said.

The passing scores were raised slowly, and by next spring the original scores recommended by teachers will take effect in all subject areas. Last spring, students passed the math portion of the seventh-grade test if they reached a score of 445 on a scale of 300 to 800. Ninety-six percent did.

Is anyone surprised that when a test is used for promotion purposes, everyone raises such a fuss that the passing scores are dropped? A score of 445 is not that high, not when the bottom is 300. The idea of gradually changing the passing score isn't bad, except that it might be seen as unfair and confusing to hold students from different years to different standards. Overall, though, it looks like Georgia is unwilling to set a meaningfully-difficult passing score for the exam, which makes the exam virtually worthless for promotion purposes.

Much ado about nothingFor all

Much ado about nothing

For all the "furor" unleashed over the linking of student promotion to performance on the Gateway exam in Georgia's public schools, not one student has been denied a diploma based on test results. Most students pass it on the first try. Predictably, the warnings of mass flunkings and the perils of judging students by one test scores have given way to complains that the test is too, well, easy:

So far, no high school student has been denied a diploma. And since its inception, system records show nine out of 10 elementary and middle school students have passed all sections of the exam on their first try...This school year, only 250 students out of 15,000 test-takers fell into the net of a transition class, in which teachers straddle the curricula of two grades with the goal of reuniting students with their peers. Nearly all who have been placed in transition classes succeed....

Donna Phillips, whose oldest son brought home failing and near-failing grades on several report cards as a seventh-grader, said he was promoted to the eighth grade because he passed Gateway. At her insistence, he repeated eighth grade the following year. "They were going to send him on to summer school. I had to have a fit basically to hold him back," she said. Now her youngest son has brazenly told her he doesn't have to do well in his classes, he just has to pass the exam. "Gateway needs to be more complete," Phillips said. "It's way too easy for them to pass. It's that, or the rest of the school year is worthless."

However, the rules in place for Gateway scores have apparently been inconsistent:

Some teachers have complained that the standards for promotion are a moving target. In fact, the rules have changed since the program began. The original passing threshold recommended by teachers was lowered in math, science and social studies after the school system projected it would have too many students in summer school, [Executive director of student assessment Linda] Mitchell said.

The passing scores were raised slowly, and by next spring the original scores recommended by teachers will take effect in all subject areas. Last spring, students passed the math portion of the seventh-grade test if they reached a score of 445 on a scale of 300 to 800. Ninety-six percent did.

Is anyone surprised that when a test is used for promotion purposes, everyone raises such a fuss that the passing scores are dropped? A score of 445 is not that high, not when the bottom is 300. The idea of gradually changing the passing score isn't bad, except that it might be seen as unfair and confusing to hold students from different years to different standards. Overall, though, it looks like Georgia is unwilling to set a meaningfully-difficult passing score for the exam, which makes the exam virtually worthless for promotion purposes.

Teacher unions fight for more

Teacher unions fight for more money, no accountability

Good article in this weekend's New York Post about the deleterious effect of teachers' unions on educational reform. What's changed in our schools in the past 20 years? Well, teacher's salaries, annual per-pupil spending, and total annual expenditures have all increased. Of course, these changes were all endorsed by the unions. What's the result?

Recent reports provide fresh evidence of our continuing educational emergency. The U.S. Commission on National Security lately lamented the fact that U.S. students lag behind other countries in scientific knowledge and mathematics. Most recently, the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education released its findings after a review of the state of American education 20 years since "A Nation at Risk."

The Task Force found that the performance of U.S. public schools remains stagnant. For instance, about 80 million first graders "have walked into schools where they have scant chance of learning more than the youngsters whose plight troubled the commission in 1983."

Could it be that these changes demanded by the unions have benefited teachers more so than students? Perhaps we need to try something else, such as "reforms that would empower parents or allow private schools to compete on a level playing field for students"? What could be the problem there?

Everywhere pro-parent measures have passed, reformers have faced intense opposition from the teacher unions. With over 3 million members and dues-revenues that exceed $1 billion a year, the unions are an empire-like force...Today, the unions are better prepared to block constructive reforms than they were in 1983. For example, teacher union membership and revenues have escalated, and the unions' stranglehold on education policy - typified by the failure to include private school choice in the No Child Left Behind Act - is as strong as ever...Reformers who want to see schools improve in 2003 and beyond should not make the mistake of underestimating the opposition they will face from the teacher unions.

Think he's exaggerating? Think again. Here's the latest from the Education Intelligence Agency:

The Education Intelligence Agency COMMUNIQUE-- April 21, 2003: Oakland [The Oakland Education Association (OEA)]'s Assessment and Accountability Committee is considering a proposal that would forbid OEA members from administering the state's CAT/6 standardized test.

This isn't on the EIA website, though, so I decided to search for the original story. All I found, though, was this story about the OEA fighting teacher layoffs (brought on in part by those raises they fought so hard for - Economics 101, in the real world). If the story about the OEA's attempt to block the CAT/6 exam is true, I have to know more about the reason behind it. Does anyone out there have more information about this?

Teacher unions fight for more

Teacher unions fight for more money, no accountability

Good article in this weekend's New York Post about the deleterious effect of teachers' unions on educational reform. What's changed in our schools in the past 20 years? Well, teacher's salaries, annual per-pupil spending, and total annual expenditures have all increased. Of course, these changes were all endorsed by the unions. What's the result?

Recent reports provide fresh evidence of our continuing educational emergency. The U.S. Commission on National Security lately lamented the fact that U.S. students lag behind other countries in scientific knowledge and mathematics. Most recently, the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education released its findings after a review of the state of American education 20 years since "A Nation at Risk."

The Task Force found that the performance of U.S. public schools remains stagnant. For instance, about 80 million first graders "have walked into schools where they have scant chance of learning more than the youngsters whose plight troubled the commission in 1983."

Could it be that these changes demanded by the unions have benefited teachers more so than students? Perhaps we need to try something else, such as "reforms that would empower parents or allow private schools to compete on a level playing field for students"? What could be the problem there?

Everywhere pro-parent measures have passed, reformers have faced intense opposition from the teacher unions. With over 3 million members and dues-revenues that exceed $1 billion a year, the unions are an empire-like force...Today, the unions are better prepared to block constructive reforms than they were in 1983. For example, teacher union membership and revenues have escalated, and the unions' stranglehold on education policy - typified by the failure to include private school choice in the No Child Left Behind Act - is as strong as ever...Reformers who want to see schools improve in 2003 and beyond should not make the mistake of underestimating the opposition they will face from the teacher unions.

Think he's exaggerating? Think again. Here's the latest from the Education Intelligence Agency:

The Education Intelligence Agency COMMUNIQUE-- April 21, 2003: Oakland [The Oakland Education Association (OEA)]'s Assessment and Accountability Committee is considering a proposal that would forbid OEA members from administering the state's CAT/6 standardized test.

This isn't on the EIA website, though, so I decided to search for the original story. All I found, though, was this story about the OEA fighting teacher layoffs (brought on in part by those raises they fought so hard for - Economics 101, in the real world). If the story about the OEA's attempt to block the CAT/6 exam is true, I have to know more about the reason behind it. Does anyone out there have more information about this?

Teacher unions fight for more

Teacher unions fight for more money, no accountability

Good article in this weekend's New York Post about the deleterious effect of teachers' unions on educational reform. What's changed in our schools in the past 20 years? Well, teacher's salaries, annual per-pupil spending, and total annual expenditures have all increased. Of course, these changes were all endorsed by the unions. What's the result?

Recent reports provide fresh evidence of our continuing educational emergency. The U.S. Commission on National Security lately lamented the fact that U.S. students lag behind other countries in scientific knowledge and mathematics. Most recently, the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education released its findings after a review of the state of American education 20 years since "A Nation at Risk."

The Task Force found that the performance of U.S. public schools remains stagnant. For instance, about 80 million first graders "have walked into schools where they have scant chance of learning more than the youngsters whose plight troubled the commission in 1983."

Could it be that these changes demanded by the unions have benefited teachers more so than students? Perhaps we need to try something else, such as "reforms that would empower parents or allow private schools to compete on a level playing field for students"? What could be the problem there?

Everywhere pro-parent measures have passed, reformers have faced intense opposition from the teacher unions. With over 3 million members and dues-revenues that exceed $1 billion a year, the unions are an empire-like force...Today, the unions are better prepared to block constructive reforms than they were in 1983. For example, teacher union membership and revenues have escalated, and the unions' stranglehold on education policy - typified by the failure to include private school choice in the No Child Left Behind Act - is as strong as ever...Reformers who want to see schools improve in 2003 and beyond should not make the mistake of underestimating the opposition they will face from the teacher unions.

Think he's exaggerating? Think again. Here's the latest from the Education Intelligence Agency:

The Education Intelligence Agency COMMUNIQUE-- April 21, 2003: Oakland [The Oakland Education Association (OEA)]'s Assessment and Accountability Committee is considering a proposal that would forbid OEA members from administering the state's CAT/6 standardized test.

This isn't on the EIA website, though, so I decided to search for the original story. All I found, though, was this story about the OEA fighting teacher layoffs (brought on in part by those raises they fought so hard for - Economics 101, in the real world). If the story about the OEA's attempt to block the CAT/6 exam is true, I have to know more about the reason behind it. Does anyone out there have more information about this?

More affirmative action commentaryThomas Sowell

More affirmative action commentary

Thomas Sowell is on the job with his description of the tortured "logic" of affirmative action. Ruben Navarrette, Jr. takes a stab at a

More affirmative action commentaryThomas Sowell

More affirmative action commentary

Thomas Sowell is on the job with his description of the tortured "logic" of affirmative action. Ruben Navarrette, Jr. takes a stab at a

More affirmative action commentaryThomas Sowell

More affirmative action commentary

Thomas Sowell is on the job with his description of the tortured "logic" of affirmative action. Ruben Navarrette, Jr. takes a stab at a cost-benefit analysis of reducing admissions standards for minorities, and he emphasizes what I've been saying all along (though much more elegantly): Removing affirmative action would force us to fix the K-12 system, so that minorities would not need AA to be better represented in college. John Rosenberg of Discriminations comments on this article as well (he's just as surprised as I to see it in the WaPo).

Peter Kirsanow of National Review asks, "When will racial preferences end?". He also provides - ooh, be still my heart - test score data:

So [AA] will end when (1) the grades and test scores of preferred minority applicants are high enough so that a "critical mass" could be admitted without preferences... the first standard is...troublesome. Even leaving aside the fact that the proponents of preference have been unable or unwilling to define "critical mass," when can we reasonably expect that the grades and test scores of college applicants from preferred minority groups will be competitive with those of others?

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom's review of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores of high-school students provides some insight. The Thernstroms computed the differences between black students and white students on the NAEP achievement tests and expressed them in terms of years. For example, in 1971, the mean differential between blacks and whites in reading proficiency was 5.9 years. That is, if the typical 17-year-old white student was reading at an 11th-grade level, the typical 17-year-old black student was reading at a 5th-grade equivalency.

The reading gap had narrowed to 2.5 years by the mid 1980s, but then actually began to expand, so that by the mid '90s the gap stood at 3.9 years. In other words, it took nearly 25 years for the gap to narrow by a mere 2 years. In mathematics, the gap only narrowed by approximately 1 year over a similar period, and by the mid '90s stood at 3.4 years. Most sobering was the science gap, which actually grew — by nearly a year — over a 25-year period.

Were these trends to continue, the reading and math scores of black students wouldn't be competitive with those of whites until about the year 2065, with a prodigious science gap remaining. But even this may be an optimistic assessment. For compounding the test-score differential is the self-perpetuating nature of preferences.

What's one way to break this vicious cycle? Homeschooling - which is on the rise among black parents. Joanne Jacobs has the goods on this new trend. The passage she quotes by Paula Penn-Nabrit is so good, it's worth repeating:

"The thing that black kids are missing across the board is the advantage that white children have, of learning in an environment designed with those children in mind and populated with people who reflect those children," she said. "Black children don't have that opportunity, and it permeates everything, including the level of expectation of performance. I don't think that most black kids experience overt racism, but I think there are a lifetime of subtle messages that are passed along."

I consider AA, in the form of quotas and lowered standards, to be one of those "subtle messages."

Finally, here's John McWhorter in the consistently-aweseme City Journal, posing the provocative question, "Who should get into college?" I'm a little late on this (it was out on the 16th), but it's so good I have to blog it. Needless to say, McWhorter's answer to this question will enrage some:

The dismal failure of the “diversity” experiment of the last two decades offers an important lesson for a post-affirmative-action admissions policy. Even as we seek diversity in the worthy...sense, we must recognize that students need to be able to excel at college-level studies. Nobody wins, after all, when a young man or woman of whatever color, unprepared for the academic rigors of a top university, flunks out, or a school dumbs down its curriculum to improve graduation rates. The problem, then, is to find some way to measure a student’s potential that still leaves administrators enough leeway to ensure that campus life benefits from a rich variety of excellences and life experiences.

As it turns out, we have—and use—the measure: the Scholastic Aptitude Test...Nowadays, a creeping fashion [My comment: Creeping? Try "stampeding." ] dismisses the SAT as culturally biased, claiming that it assesses only a narrow range of ability and is irrelevant to predicting students’ future performance. But while it is true that the SAT is far from perfect...the exam really does tend to forecast students’ future success, as even William Bowen and Derek Bok admit in their valentine to racial preferences, The Shape of the River. In their sample of three classes from 1951 to 1989 at 28 selective universities, Bowen and Bok show that SAT scores correlated neatly with students’ eventual class ranks.

Oooh, he's daring to defend the SAT. The AA crowd will have fits.

I’ve taught students who, though intelligent, possessed limited reading vocabularies and struggled with the verbal portion of the SAT. I have never known a single one of these students to reach the top ranks in one of my classes. “I think I understand what Locke is saying,” one student told me in frustration while preparing for a big exam. But Locke isn’t Heidegger—his prose, while sophisticated, is clear as crystal. This student confessed that he was “no reader” and possessed only a “tiny vocabulary.” Without the vocabulary, he was at sea. Conversely, my textaholic students are usually the stars, gifted at internalizing material and interpreting it in fresh ways—and this is especially true of students immersed in high literature.

A post-preferences admissions policy, then, must accept that below a certain cut-off point in SAT scores, a student runs a serious risk of failing to graduate.

Which is something that the preferences supporters would like us all to ignore. "Diversity" in the college culture has nothing to do with making sure those "diverse" students actually receive a diploma. Thomas Sowell has consistently pointed out the miserable graduation rate of minorities that are admitted under AA policies, but the AA crowd have been forceful in sweeping this information under the rug (and calling those of us who mention it "racist").

It's not racist to say that colleges should admit only the students who meet the academy's minimal intellectual standards. However, it is racist to implement policies that assume minority students cannot meet those standards; it is racist to admit students who do not meet the standards solely due to their skin color; and it is racist to value minority students solely as tokens that enrich the "diversity" of the campus.

Okay, how many calories do

Okay, how many calories do just the ears have?

Howdy, all. I took Easter weekend off - I needed yesterday just to recover from all the driving (and the chocolate bunny and malted-milk-chocolate egg overdose). I'll be posting later on today. If you're a new reader via Instapundit and my new blog, welcome! Please feel free to leave comments and shoot me an email.

UNC Prof prepares his students

UNC Prof prepares his students for the real world

Dr. Mike S. Adams, an associate professor at UNC-Wilmington, used to oppose affirmative action - but has decided to implement it in the classroom. After all, the university at which he works has put him under "direct pressure from the administration to engage in both racial and gender discrimination as a member of various university search committees." Rather than try to fight this unfair practice, why, he's decided to create a new grading scheme for his classroom that is more consistent with what affirmative action supporters demand:

...I have decided to abandon my long-standing opposition to affirmative action after listening to the oral arguments in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case challenging admissions policies at the University of Michigan. While listening to these recorded arguments, I learned that public universities have a "compelling interest in diversity" which supersedes simplistic notions of reverse discrimination. Now, because my views have changed, I am forced to alter my classroom grading policies.

Students in my classes will continue to have their final grades based principally on test performance. Students will also continue to have a portion of their grade determined by class participation and/or a final paper depending on the class in which they are enrolled...

After I compute final averages, I will then implement the new aspect of the grading process which is modeled after existing affirmative action policies at the university. Specifically, I will be computing a class average which I will then compare to the individual performance of all white males enrolled in my classes. All white males who exceed the class average will have points deducted and added to the final averages of women and minorities. A student need not have ever engaged in discrimination in order to have points deducted. Nor must a student have ever been a victim of discrimination in order to receive additional points.

I expect that my new policy will be well received by some, and poorly received by others. For those in the latter category, please contact Human Resources for further elaboration on the concept of affirmative action. You may also contact the Office of Campus Diversity for additional guidance.

Hee hee hee. There's a little explanation at the bottom stating that Dr. Adams "is an expert in satire and is prone to occasional bouts of excessive sarcasm. He is also frequently chastised for telling the truth at the expense of people's feelings." I figure that few people reading this site would require that disclaimer to understand Dr. Adams' point. However, I have no doubt that there are two types of pro-affirmative-action university educrats who will see no humor in this whatsoever.

One group - the Hostiles - will be the ideologues who consider "diversity" a sacred topic and will oppose any attempt to poke fun at it. They're the ones already feverishly writing emails and letters denouncing Dr. Adams with phrases like "hurtful" and "hate speech" and "racist". Bonus points to them if they notice this was posted on a Christian site and they manage to toss in an indictment of "Judeo-Christian oppression" as well. The other group - the Clueless - will miss the satire here entirely, because this proposed grading scheme is what they have been using in their classrooms all along, and they won't understand why the rest of us recognize it as preposterous. They'll just assume that Dr. Adams is a new convert to their politically-correct way of thinking.

"We're not testing much of

"We're not testing much of anything"

While Florida considers allowing disabled students to bypass the FCAT, Michigan has instituted state standardized tests for severely disabled youngsters - and parents and teachers say the tests are a complete waste of time:

Wing Lake serves the kind of children who, in a less civilized society, would be discarded as vegetables and hidden away in institutions. The 140 students, from the ages of 3 to 26, have I.Q.'s below 30. Ninety percent, including Mrs. Mischley's 22-year-old son, Bobby, wear diapers. Half are in wheelchairs. For the rest of their lives, they will need to be cared for by relatives or in supervised group homes. What touches Mrs. Mischley is how much love and effort the staff puts into the students, even when, as she says, they are no longer young and cute and even when they become adults in diapers...

Thanks to Wing Lake, Mrs. Mischley says, she can take Bobby to a restaurant, and he no longer grabs food off strangers' plates. "I found a church we can go to and sit through Sunday service," she said. "He has learned the concept of time."

Given the students' limitations — most cannot even use a pencil — it is hard to believe that the federal and state governments have instituted standardized tests for these students, but it is true. And though parents like Mrs. Mischley; teachers like Mr. Hooton (Michigan's special education teacher of the year); the Wing Lake school psychologist, Bob Mossman; the principal, Thomai Gersh; and the district special education director, Carolyn Packard, all think that this testing wastes weeks of everyone's time and generates huge amounts of useless paperwork, the federal government will soon mandate even more standardized tests for these students. When I asked Dr. James Rowley, a physician and the parent of a 9-year-old at Wing Lake, what officials were thinking, he replied, "I'm not sure they were thinking."

Because these tests can't be individualized to assess the specific severe disabilities, of the type mentioned in the article, the teachers who spend time with these tests are basically assessing the students themselves, and mailing the results off to the state. What do they get back? Exactly what they sent in.

This bureaucratic adventure began with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act of 1997 and the altruistic-sounding goal of testing every child, no matter how disabled...But how to develop one test for so many children who are so severely disabled in such different ways? You can't, really. So what Michigan came up with — and state officials say it is a national model — are broad test categories like "interacting with print" and "participating in solitary physical activities."

It then becomes the job of the teacher, who knows the child best, to take that broad category and develop a specific test challenge for each child...It takes most of March for the teachers to administer the tests. Then they send all that paperwork to Lansing, wait a few months, and get back the exact information they sent.

Sounds pretty useless to me, especially considering there is already a "federally mandated assessment program" developed precisely for these types of students - the Individualized Education Program, or I.E.P. It's essentially a long narrative that teachers can fill out quarterly that gives the parents a great deal of input on how their child is doing. When students are this disabled, the idea of a standardized test is ludicrous, and it's hard to believe that Michigan - and the federal government - really believe that standardized assessments are necessary in these cases.

A snow job of a

A snow job of a test item

When is a snow day no fun for youngsters? When you have to write about it on a standardized test - and you really aren't sure what a "snow day" is:

Many fourth graders at [Boston's] Hernandez Elementary School here do not remember what they did on their last snow day, which was two years ago. Others like Gabriel Prado, 10, remember just the painful parts, like being hit by a snowball thrown by his older brother. Although the students cross their fingers and hope for the big morning announcement every time the sky becomes gray, two years, they say, is a long time to think back on their last lucky break. And that has become a problem for the students, who have to retake part of the state's standardized test.

A question on the fourth-grade writing section of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, which all the state's fourth graders took on Thursday, asked them to imagine waking up to their "dream come true," school being canceled because of a snowstorm. Students were asked to "write a story about a snow day off from school that you remember."

It has been years since many Massachusetts school districts, including Boston, have canceled school because of inclement weather. Although heavy snow fell this winter, almost all of it was on weekends or vacations.

Many students, educators said, have no idea what a snow day is.

Hey, kids, you don't get to run outside and play when the snowflakes come down - but you do have to be graded on an essay about it. Boy, talk about adding insult to injury.

UGA's drive for diversityDespite a

UGA's drive for diversity

Despite a small pool of eligible applicants, the University of Georgia is committed to increasing the number of black students on campus. The problem? UGA's average SAT score for enrolled freshmen is 1210, which is well above the national average for college-bound high school seniors - but fewer than 900 black high school students in Georgia scored above a 1200. The ones who do that well often leave the South for more prestigious colleges elsewhere - and closer to home, there are Morehouse and Spelman, two of the nation's most highly-regarded historically-black colleges. The pool that UGA has to draw from is not large - but UGA is convinced that the low percentage of black students currently on campus is what is keeping other black applicants away.

Various reasons for the low percentage of current students are suggested:

Many minorities say the school shouldn't rely so much on standardized tests. High school grades are the most important factor in admissions, but SAT scores are also strongly considered. Some educators say black students don't perform as well on standardized tests because of unequal access to high-quality education and a history of poverty. They also say the test questions are biased in favor of whites.

Well, you know what I think about that last reason. It's absolutely untrue (I've never seen anyone quoted on this who provided data to support it), and it's counter-productive - why should a kid study if his teacher has convinced him that he'll do poorly due to test bias? However, there's definitely something to that "unequal access to high-quality education," reason:

The 34-campus University System of Georgia, which has an overall black enrollment of 23 percent, has undertaken a study of the factors that keep black men out of college in Georgia, said Arlethia Perry-Johnson, spokeswoman for the Board of Regents. Some factors include low expectations, poor preparation and emphasis on sports over academics.

Those low expectations were obvious to the students at Lithonia High. They talked about one educator who spoke about being a plumber or a janitor as possible career paths. They complained that counselors only emphasized getting through high school rather than preparing for college. Some said the SAT test caught them off-guard because the school didn't do enough to get them ready. "All they focus on is just the graduation test," said Patrick Gray, who is going to Morehouse. "They think we're not capable of doing it but we really are. Look at society and tell me why we have low standards," said Tameka Rivers, who plans to attend Spelman.

I agree with both kids - the suggestions of plumber and janitor as a career path are incredibly insulting, and for a school to ignore SAT preparation is devastating. What's more, I think that the attempt to convince black kids that the test is biased against them falls into the category of saddling them with low expectations.

Interestingly enough, other public universities in Georgia aren't having this problem - and they didn't have to resort to lowering standards, or charges of test bias, to increase black enrollment:

Georgia State, which is 26.7 percent black, has had the greatest success recruiting black students of any large traditionally white campus in the state. It had 7,344 black students last fall, the largest number of any non-historically black institution in the country, said Associate Provost Bill Fritz. Part of the reason Georgia State is attractive to blacks is its location in downtown Atlanta. Georgia State has also always accepted many students who couldn't get in to UGA....

The average freshman class SAT score at Georgia State has risen from 877 in 1992 to 1,064 last fall. "There was a fear as we raised our entrance requirements, we would lose minority students," he said. "That didn't happen. The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't take into account that when you raise your entrance requirements, you become attractive to a different group of students."

Bingo. You get the black students who have done well and don't wish to be insulted by lowered standards, like the two quoted above.

An alternate pathTwo Florida State

An alternate path

Two Florida State Representatives have sent a bill to Governor Jeb Bush to allow students with disabilities to receive high school diplomas without passing the FCAT reading and math tests. What disabilities will be covered under this plan?

Students with speech or language difficulties, hearing and vision handicaps, autism, emotional difficulties, brain injuries or disabilities such as dyslexia could be certified by an "individual education plan" team to get a waiver of the FCAT's graduation requirements. The education team - made up of teachers, guidance counselors and other experts - would assess the student's learning progress from class participation, homework and other examples of learning besides the FCAT.

And what requirements would these students have to meet?

The bill requires students to complete academic credits and other requirements for high school graduation and to take the FCAT in the 10th and 11th grades. It also removes the requirement that the students take life management skills classes in the ninth and 10th grades, requires the State Board of Education to adopt rules for test accommodation and requires counties to provide instruction for disabled students for year-by-year progression in school.

Sen. Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, was the Senate sponsor of the House-passed bill. He said it will "open doors and provide greater educational opportunities for Florida's disabled students." In an unusual move, Wise got unanimous Senate consent to immediately certify the bill to the governor for signature. It usually takes several days, even more than a week, for the paperwork to be routed on routine bills.

So students have to take the FCAT, but will be allowed to graduate if they don't pass it. It's important for the State Board to put testing accommodation rules into place - but just as important that they make these rules as defensible and clear-cut as possible. Regardless, they should also prepare to be sued by students who demand accommodation and don't receive it. While this sort of bill may help those whom it is intended to help, it is also incentive, for those wishing to bypass the FCAT, to obtain a learning disability classification. If the Florida educrats are smart, they will examine the current disability rates in the high-school population - and will be watchful for sharp rises in that figure if this bill goes into effect.

The worlds of war and

The worlds of war and psychometrics collide - Part 2

So, what's the latest on the scandalous tale of a lowly temp being fired by testing giant ACT, Inc. for wearing an anti-war pin to work? What, you mean you haven't heard about this? Surely, there's been nothing else going on in the world to distract you from this little tiff in Iowa City...

Well, it begins here with this accusation of wrongful termination (registration required for all stories):

[ACT intern] Sarah Townsend said supervisor Chris McPherren terminated her employment and escorted her from the building after she defied a company policy that prohibits political statements about the war on Iraq in the workplace but allows displaying the American flag. Townsend said she had worked for the not-for-profit educational-testing and research company for seven months as a temporary employee. She was planning to leave the company in eight weeks to attend graduate school before the April 4 firing, she said.

"People who don't say, 'Rah, rah, support the war' are told they have to shut up," said Townsend, 25. "It was obvious in that environment that a pro-war attitude was acceptable, while a pro-peace mindset was not." Two ACT employees confirmed Monday that Townsend was fired for not removing the button. A company spokesman said it could not discuss personnel issues.

Hmm, that's a mighty big button she's wearing in the photo. What's more, a month before her firing, all employees were notified via email of this company policy:

"ACT does not condone in the workplace any outward display pro or con in relation to the conflict in Iraq. This workplace must exhibit the corporate values of mutual respect and courteous relationships. I ask that you please approach employees with buttons or other displays and instruct them to remove them..."

Ms. Townsend is muttering about lawsuits, despite the fact that the First Amendment only covers government restrictions on speech, and companies are free to fire employees for any reason that hasn't already been termed illegal (such as racial discrimination). In other words, she's got a big button, and news coverage, but not a leg to stand on.

What's more, at least one Iowan thinks that if ACT did fire Ms. Townsend for this reason, they were correct in doing so:

Townsend won't win [a lawsuit] because of ACT's legal rights. She shouldn't win because it would endanger private companies' rights to mandate regulations within the workplace, which could have ramifications beyond antiwar buttons. Overturning the policy would not lead to anarchy, but it could make it difficult for employers to fire employees or maintain certain standards.

If employees wish to keep their jobs, occasionally they have to agree to rules they ordinarily would not follow, such as removing piercings or following a dress code. Wearing a button supporting peace is both different and the same. First, it is different because of its explicitly political message, which ACT specifically requested not appear in the workplace. The button is similar to other requirements because it is part of a workplace regulation, and in a private company, employers have the ultimate say.

But, this is like, peace, you know, and dissent is patriotic, and peaceniks should be allowed do whatever they want, be it block traffic, throw Molotov cocktails at police, or wear pins at work in defiance of company policy. Because they're morally superior to the rest of us, right? And companies have no right to restrict political expression on the job, right?

So, would Ms. Townsend would be in favor of ACT being restricted from firing someone who wore an American Nazi Party pin to work during election time? Or are extreme political viewpoints (remember, we're talking about Iowa here) only okay in the workplace when peaceniks want it to be?

But lo, the plot thickens. Now ACT's official statement is that the pin is not the reason for the firing - and "peace" protestors get involved:

ACT on Monday continued to deny firing a temporary employee for refusing to remove an antiwar button at work, even as a handful of protesters gathered to denounce the action. The protesters brandished signs on a street corner approximately one block from the headquarters of the not-for-profit educational-testing and research company.

Sarah Townsend, 25, said a company supervisor terminated her employment on April 4 after she disobeyed a policy that prohibits employees from expressing political views on the war in Iraq but permits displaying the American flag. "We think it's unfortunate that they are basing this on misinformation," ACT spokesman Ed Colby said. "No one was fired for political views, and no one was escorted from the building." He said the employee had walked off the job voluntarily...

The seven protesters included Sasha Waters, a UI assistant professor of cinema/comparative literature, who taped her mouth shut with two pieces of black electrical tape. They held signs that read "ACT failed First Amendment test" and "Justice for Sarah Townsend" at the intersection of North Dodge Street and Scott Boulevard between 7:30 and 9 a.m. on Monday...

What would "justice" be for Ms. Townsend, exactly? She was planning to quit anyway, and may have done so rather than be fired. What's more, now she can be like all the other "peace" protestors, who either don't have jobs, or have jobs that allow them to spend their time this uselessly (like "assistant professor of cinema/comparative literature", say). This is obvious, because they can be at any place, any time, at the drop of a hat, protesting something as insignificant as a temporary employee quitting/being fired over company policy. No time to do meaningful work, or really pay attention to the war's effect on the world - not when there's a need for theatrics over something as meaningless as this.

Sheesh.

A devil of a time

A devil of a time in Georgia

Boy, the state testing news from Georgia just keeps getting worse and worse. First, I read about a mixup where live test items appeared on practice exams, thus cancelling the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) administration for five of its eight scheduled grades. Next, an Atlanta newspaper columnist detailed a litany of woes regarding Georgia state testing. What could happen next?

Live items could get posted on the web, that's what could happen:

Just as students were gearing up to take out their No. 2 pencils, Georgia officials decided to suspend most state tests in grades 1-8 this year after discovering that some 270 test questions were available on an Internet site for students, parents, and teachers.

Is this related to the practice test live-item mixup reported earlier? Here's the timeline:

The state already had been scrambling to keep its tests on schedule. On Feb. 21, the state administrative-services department rescinded a six-year, $84 million contract with Riverside Publishing, a division of the Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Co., after a competitor protested that all bidders had not received fair and equal treatment. The department ordered a rebidding of the contract, which had been approved by Superintendent Cox's predecessor, Linda C. Schrenko.

Less than a week later, on Feb. 26, members of the testing staff in the state education department were reviewing the printed test forms when they spotted a small number of items that also appeared in the nonsecure portions of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests' item bank.

On March 10, Riverside provided a preliminary report that led the education department to conclude the extent of item exposure was "unacceptably high in most grade and content areas."

On March 27, Ms. Cox and Wanda Barrs, the chairwoman of the state board of education, announced plans to sign an "emergency procurement contract" with Riverside, for $4.7 million, to enable a scaled-back version of this spring's assessment to proceed as planned.

So, it seems that live items were not only printed in practice test booklets, but also made available for practice on the web. Who's at fault? The finger-pointing has already begun:

The debacle has led to a flurry of allegations about who's at fault. Collin Earnst, the director of media relations for Houghton Mifflin, said Riverside was given the test questions by the previous contractor, Measured Progress, based in Dover, N.H.

"So the questions were there prior to us being given the contract and prior to Kathy Cox's administration," he said. "If there were any problems with these items, if they were released on any practice tests prior to us getting the questions, that was obviously out of our control. It happened before we ever saw them."

Stuart R. Kahl, the president of Measured Progress, retorted that "it's premature for that statement." Measured Progress is being paid by the Georgia education department to review the remaining tests in grades 4, 6, and 8 and ensure that all the items are secure. The company will also keep the online item bank, being used by tens of thousands of teachers and students daily, operating through the end of this school year.

Measured Progress created the bank, which contains three levels of questions: Web-based practice tests that parents and students can access from home; nonsecure items for school use; and a secure item bank for high-stakes, statewide exams. Company officials say they prepared a database of all test items available for the 2003 CRCT that coded those used for the practice tests or teacher-item banking system, and thus were not available to be used on the secure statewide exams. They also identified questions that had appeared on previous years' editions of the tests and were subsequently released to the public.

"To be quite honest, I don't know if we'll ever know exactly what happened," said Ms. Cox, a Republican who was elected last November and took office Jan. 13.

Astounding. Incidentally, a former state superintendent is quoted as saying that we should be doing a better job of staffing state-level testing departments. I agree, but the roadblocks to adequate staffing that I mentioned near the end of this post aren't going to disappear any time soon. Can Georgia solve its problems by doing more of its testing in-house? They'd have more control, but they're going to have to deal with the same shortage of psychometricians that the testing companies are struggling with, not to mention all the problems inherent in starting a testing group from scratch.

Academic freedom is "outdated"First, University

Academic freedom is "outdated"

First, University of California President Richard Atkinson questioned the usefulness of the SAT as a requirement for UC applicants. Now, he's questioning the usefulness of protecting students from ideology-addled professors who use their classroom time to push propaganda. NoIndoctrination.Org has a newsflash about it and ways you can help stop the new statement on Academic Freedom. Stanley Kurtz, who wrote about UC-SD parent Luann Wright and her NoIndoctrination website last December, is urging people to act.

At first, it's hard to see what the fuss is about. But read Kurtz's article closely. In it, he says:

NoIndoctrination.org also argues that [U of C] has been betraying its own stated standards in the matter of academic freedom. Posted on the site are the official statements on academic freedom of the American Association of University Professors and of the University of California. Both statements highlight the need to allow students to express their own opinions, and to protect them from pressure to toe a political line. The University of California's guidelines on academic freedom, for example, state that, "To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile" to the "dispassionate duty" of a teacher. The university "assumes the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige...by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda."

These prohibitions clearly give the university grounds for taking action against professors who place their wish to radicalize students over their obligation to expose them to contrary views, or to allow them to freely voice all views without punishment or pressure. I don't see why tenure decisions should not be influenced by a professor's willingness to allow his students freedom of thought and expression.

Now, go back to the NoIndoctrination site:

University of California President Richard Atkinson and UC Berkeley Law School Professor Robert Post are proposing a new statement on Academic Freedom for the University of California - one that NoIndoctrination.org believes will undermine the academic freedom rights of students. President Atkinson claims that the current statement is "outdated"...

The following statements are part of the current UC document on Academic Freedom, but these will be eliminated if the Atkinson/Post proposal is adopted:

"To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary, in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined - not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts."

"Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumes the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda."

Emphasis in the original. In other words, the very statements that Kurtz pointed out served as protection for students - statements which UC behavior has contradicted in the past - are now going to be removed due to their "outdated" nature. As NoIndoctrination puts it, "As far as the academic freedom rights of students are concerned, the new proposal eliminates everything of substance."

A "high rejection rate" for

A "high rejection rate" for free money

Not every kid who applied for Virginia's Providing Real Opportunities for Maximizing In-state Student Excellence (PROMISE) college scholarships this year was accepted, and that's a real shame. At least, that's the spin that reporter Carley Amico is trying to put on this story, starting with the headline, "Students See High Rejection Rate":

Nearly half of the Northern Panhandle PROMISE scholarship applicants were denied this year...In Brooke, Hancock, Marshall, Ohio, Tyler and Wetzel counties 909 public and private school students applied for PROMISE scholarships this spring. Of those, 473 students were awarded scholarships while 436 applications were denied because they did not meet grade point average or standardized test score requirements.

So, for those who are determined to see the glass as half-empty, rather than half-full, what exactly were those requirements for the free tuition money?

The West Virginia PROMISE (Providing Real Opportunities for Maximizing In-state Student Excellence) scholarship program was approved by the state legislature in 1999...It offers each West Virginia high school graduate who completes school with a 3.0 GPA and an ACT score of at least 21, or a combined SAT score of 1000, a full tuition scholarship to a state college or university.

Umm-hmmm. A 3.0 is a B average. The average SAT score for college-bound seniors in 2002 is 1020. The average ACT score for these same students is 21.8. In other words, a Virginia high school student need not even score higher than the average of their peers on either exam in order to receive a full tuition scholarship.

Oh, I agree that it's a shame that half of the PROMISE applicants didn't meet this requirement, but I don't think the problems are with the exams.

At John Marshall High School, 76 of the 233 PROMISE applicants received the scholarship. Principal David Takach said he is not certain why 157 applicants did not meet the requirements and he has not seen data regarding why the applications were denied. But he does believe students' performance on the ACT standardized test could be the problem.

"I really don't know the reason," he said. "I'm guessing ... with most of the people who didn't get it, it was because of the ACT. He noted that many students who excel in the classroom simply do not perform well on standardized tests...And the PROMISE scholarship is not for average students, he said. The requirements of a 3.0 GPA and a 21 on the ACT are benchmarks that even some fairly successful students cannot meet.

Umm, actually, it is for average students. It's for slightly-below-average students, in fact, if I may be so blunt. (And I do need to be this blunt, given that another school principal describes the requirements as "stringent" later on in the article, an opinion that the reporter lets go unchallenged.) I give the principal credit for defending his students, but he should get the facts straight, first.

David Wood, Superintendent of Marshall County Schools, pointed out that many of those students who did not receive PROMISE scholarships will go to college and can do very well. "That does not mean that child would not be successful in college," Wood said. He added the college attendance rate at both John Marshall and Cameron is high. "I think we do an excellent job of preparing kids to go to college," Wood said.

Good for you. Do you do an excellent job of preparing them to excel in college and graduate from college as well? That's the real test of the quality of a high-school education these days.

I'm not bashing the scholarship here - not at all. I think it's a fine idea - but it's also amusing that the requirements can be called "stringent" these days. Amusing, but maybe a bit sad, too.

Preschool peaceniks in the makingMichelle

Preschool peaceniks in the making

Michelle Malkin is in her usual state of righteous indignation today (and she does it so well). She's uncovered a guide to "developing community-building, deep thinking, and partnership to change the world for the better," written by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). The title is, "That's Not Fair! A Teacher's Guide to Activism with Young Children." I'm sure the title is supposed to reflect the automatic reaction of preschoolers to authority, but I think it reflects the feelings of the authors of the Guide when confronted with the realities of the world:

On page 106 of the guide, co-author Ann Pelo details an activism project she initiated at a Seattle preschool after her students spotted a Blue Angels rehearsal overhead as they played in a local park. "Those are Navy airplanes," Pelo lectured the toddlers. "They're built for war, but right now, there is no war, so the pilots learn how to do fancy tricks in their planes." The kids returned to playing, but Pelo wouldn't let it rest. The next day she pushes the children to "communicate their feelings about the Blue Angels."

Pelo proudly describes her precociously politicized students' handiwork: "They drew pictures of planes with Xs through them: 'This is a crossed-off bombing plane.' They drew bomb factories labeled: 'No.' ..."If you blow up our city, we won't be happy about it. And our whole city will be destroyed. And if you blow up my favorite library, I won't be happy because there are some good books there that I haven't read yet."

...it's obvious this cathartic exercise was less for the children and more for the ax-grinding Pelo, who readily admits that she "didn't ask for parents' input about their letter-writing - she didn't genuinely want it. She felt passionately that they had done the right thing, and she wasn't interested in hearing otherwise."

One of the promotors of the Guide is the Early Childhood Equity Alliance (ECEA) ; their website states clearly that they oppose the war on Iraq:

War also causes serious emotional harm to children, both to those who lose family members, and to those who only witness the terror second-hand. As the still relevant saying from the 60's aptly puts it: "War is not healthy for children and other living things!"

As Michelle so neatly puts it:

And allowing Saddam Hussein to gas Kurds, imprison children who refused to join the Baath Party, torture their dissident fathers, and use pregnant women to shield his soldiers, is?

Hey, the ECEA lost me at the point of claiming the 60's were still relevant - that tells you just about everything you need to know about that organization. I guess they think "it's not fair" that the rest of us have moved on to the 21st-century, and we'd like our kids to understand how things really are now.

An unfair burden John Rosenberg

An unfair burden

John Rosenberg of Discriminations had another great post yesterday about the University of Michigan Law School, Diversity Is As Diversity Does. You should read the whole thing; I'm going to focus only on one little segment of it today. Here's what John had to say about the enrollment statistics at Michigan that were reported in the New York Times:

21 of the 346 current first year students at the Michigan law school are black, but of those 21 only 5 are male. I wonder whether Michigan gives greater preferences to black men than black women, and if not, why not. These students are so in demand because of the "diversity" that their presence is said to provide to others that the admissions barrier is lower for them than the other students, with an entirely predictable result: many of them resent it because they "find this role an unfair burden."

While I'm quite certain that Michigan gives greater preferences to black male applicants, it's not hard to find the data to show that this does absolutely nothing to "level the playing field" for black men as a whole. A good place to start is the National Center for Education Statistics.

For example, here’s an NCES table that provides high school dropout rates in 2000, broken down by ethnic group and gender. What we see is that 15.3% of black men drop out of high school, compared to 11.1% of black women (the rates are worse for Hispanics, but the same relationship holds; more men drop out than women). So, right off the bat, fewer black men than black women make it out of high school,and we're already down to only 84.7% of the black male population.

Note: I misread a table earlier. What follows is the corrected post. Sorry for the mixup.

Now, here’s another NCES table, based on U.S. Census reports, that provides years of education by ethnic group and gender, for Americans 25 years and older. Let’s assume that a black man isn’t going to take the LSAT and apply to law school unless he has an undergraduate degree – four or more years of college. 16.8% of all black women aged 25 and older met this qualification in 2000, and 16.2% of black men in the same peer group met it. Black women are more likely to graduate from high school, and slightly more likely to have four or more years of college, although the difference is slight (as a comparison, 30.8% of non-Hispanic white men aged 25 and over meet this qualification).

But then there's this table. In 1999-2000, black Americans earned 107,891 bachelor's degrees from degree-granting institutions. Is that evenly split between men and women? Not even close. Over 66% of the degrees were granted to black women, a margin of 2-to-1. In 1977, men earned 43% of the bachelor's degree awarded to blacks in the US; since then, the number of blacks earning bachelor's has almost doubled, but the percentage of black men in that category has steadily decreased to 34%.

How can this be reconciled with the data on years of education? Simple - the percentages include everyone aged 25 and older, and I'm betting that it's older black men, but younger black women, who have the four or more years of college under their belt. It's obvious that while the number of black men earning bachelor's degrees continues to increase every year, the number of black women doing so is increasing much more rapidly.

Given this, it is understandable that even a law school that aggressively practices affirmative action is going to have many more black female students than black male students. Furthermore, these statistics emphasize the dishonesty and uselessness of post-secondary affirmative action systems based on differential standards, differential point systems, and quotas. How can it possibly do black men any good, as a whole, to lower LSAT standards for those who apply to law school, when that is such a tiny percentage of black men overall? The problems with black men in education obviously begin much, much sooner, and affirmative action at the post-secondary level is an ineffective band-aid measure that doesn’t help the black men who really need the help.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that black men who take the LSATs are a small minority within their peer group, and they are relatively privileged and accomplished men who have beaten the odds to get that far - but, as John Rosenberg points out, affirmative action policies like those at Michigan then tell them, "We have to lower standards for you because you're just not good enough to make it on your own." Insulting, ineffective, harmful - and an "unfair burden," indeed.

Much ado about nothingAnyone hear

Much ado about nothing

Anyone hear about the "scandal" last week involving Secretary of Education Rob Paige? He was quoted as telling a Baptist Press reporter that, "All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community." The usual suspects went nuts - the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the LA Times, Senators Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy. The story was touted as proof that Secretary Paige was planning to desecularize the nation's K-12 public schools; there were calls for his resignation.

And the aftermath? Peter Wood of National Review supplies the entire quote from the interview:

In the interview, [Secretary Paige] had been responding to a question about colleges, not public schools. And in fact the transcript of the interview bears this out. The interviewer, Todd Starnes asked:

Given the choice between private and Christian — or private and public universities, what do you think — who do you think has the best deal?

What Starnes may have meant by "best deal" is by no means clear, but Paige answered:

That's a judgment, too, that would vary because each of tem have real strong points and some of them have some vulnerabilities. But, you know, all things being equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school where there's a strong appreciation of values, the kind of values that I think are associated with the Christian communities, and so that this child can be brought up in an environment that teaches them to have strong faith and to understand that there is a force greater than them personally.

Paige, in other words, declares that he would prefer to send his child to a Christian college that emphasizes Christian values. So what? A very large number of parents feel the same way, and the United States is home to a large number of sectarian colleges and universities. So, in one sense, this turns out to have been a controversy over nothing.

Emphasis mine.

So, if in one sense this was much noise and confusion over nothing, what was the story here? The story is the rush with which the "tolerant" Left is willing to portray someone as a religious bigot, especially when they already disagree with his educational "ideology":

Somewhere in the background to this noisy attack lies the very important question of what kind of society we aim to build through the nation's public schools. The Left's answer is that the schools should promote the ideology of "diversity," which offers a value system based on a hierarchy of supposed victimization. The greater the degree of victimization, the greater the compensatory awards that can be expected from society...

The Left knows what it wants and has largely achieved its vision in the schools as they now stand. Thus its basic stance is to preserve the status quo, as an institution. Secretary Paige, by contrast, offers a program of reform, which threatens the Left...

ACORN - part of the

ACORN - part of the problem

There's a fascinating article in the City Journal's Spring 2003 issue about the radical "New Left" policies of ACORN. This group (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) was inspired by one of the "silliest and most destructive groups" of the 1960's, the National Welfare Rights Organization. Now it continues to grow in size and influence in inner cities, and it's the reason that Edison Schools Inc. wasn't able to take over NYC's five worst public schools:

Consider ACORN’s successful effort in 2001 to derail Mayor Giuliani’s proposal to allow Edison Schools Inc.—a for-profit educational firm—to manage five of the lousiest of New York City’s lousy schools...what is beyond dispute is that Edison has never performed as poorly in a single one of its schools as has Gotham’s Board of Ed in the five schools the mayor proposed for privatization. In those schools, more than 80 percent of the students couldn’t read or do math at grade level. Nothing that Edison might have done could possibly have made them any worse...

Yet ACORN used every tactic in its comprehensive playbook to scuttle the Edison plan. It intimidated schools chancellor Harold Levy into letting it print leaflets at city expense, filled with false information about Edison’s record, including the charge that the firm expelled children for poor grades. ACORN obtained from school officials lists of the addresses and phone numbers of parents, whom it then barraged with calls and letters. When Edison reps tried to make their case at public forums in Harlem, ACORN activists shouted them down. For good measure, ACORN staged a noisy demonstration outside Edison’s headquarters...

Sadly, ACORN’s bullying tactics won the day, and the parents at all five schools voted against the plan. ACORN’s “victory” certainly didn’t benefit the kids, who were stuck right where they were. So who did profit? ACORN. Little appreciated was the crucial detail that ACORN itself is part of the failed bureaucratic system that any successful privatization program would unsettle.

ACORN's "visceral" opposition to capitalism and for-profit industries is not going to improve the lives of those trapped in inner-city poverty; meanwhile, ACORN lines its pockets with foundation grants and donations from addled supporters and teachers unions.

Kids who killA couple of

Kids who kill

A couple of weeks back, the Instantman introduced us all to an amazing new film. It seems that his wife, Dr Helen Smith, is a forensic psychologist who is also an expert on youth violence. She has focused her expertise into the documentary SIX, which tells the story of six teenagers who senselessly murdered an entire family on one night in 1997. Based on her previous work (found at ViolentKids.Com), I knew that she would avoid the sensationalism and pat explanations, and do a fine job of explaining why this crime happened. And I was right.

The content of the film was especially fascinating to me. No, it's not related to psychometrics, nor to educational testing - two of my other interests (read:obsessions) are true crime and the gothic/occult subcultures. This means that whenever a crime story makes the news and goth teenagers are involved - and this is happening more and more often - I am fascinated, and I read everything about it that I can. And then I want to write about it, and discuss it, and attempt to figure out why the crimes happened and what the goth subculture had to do with it. I want to get past the surface that the reporters obsess over - the black fingernails, the weird music, the bizarre appearance - and figure out what's really going on in the minds of these kids.

SIX was irresistible to me for those reasons, but I recommend it to anyone - parents, educators, psychologists - with an interest in violent youth and the inability of society to deal with these youth. The film is absolutely amazing. So amazing, in fact, that it's inspired me to start a new blog related to these interests of mine.

So, if you'd like to read my lengthy review of SIX, click here. This review is the first posting on my new blog, Blackened Rainbows. If you'd like to begin by reading the blog description, disclaimer, and a little bit more about how Dr. Smith's incredible film inspired me to put my thoughts "on paper," as it were, click here, and from there you can enter the blog and read the film review, or return to this blog.

Enjoy.

The pressure of testsDana Tofig

The pressure of tests

Dana Tofig of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wonders how many testing errors are too many, and whether the testing companies need more regulations in place:

Some high school seniors in Minnesota couldn't graduate with their classmates. More than 8,000 students in New York City were improperly sent to summer school. Closer to home, nearly 600,000 Georgia students won't take the state's most important standardized test this year...Over the past few years, the results of several other standardized tests across the nation also have been tainted by mistakes made by private testing companies.

The errors in the Georgia test that I mentioned last week are rehashed:

Most recently, on March 27, state Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox announced that some questions used on practice exams for the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, the state's curriculum test, had appeared on the actual tests that were to be given to students this month. The tests were scotched in all grades except four, six and eight, and the state is still sorting out how the error occurred.

Georgia education officials say one of two testing companies -- Measured Progress or Riverside Publishing -- is responsible. Officials from Measured Progress said they are helping the state investigate and expect some type of answer next week. Officials from Riverside Publishing, a subsidiary of publishing giant Houghton Mifflin, would not comment.

I don't blame Georgia school officials and parents for being upset. These are big problems. However, as the article makes clear, there are millions of children tested each year without error, and the errors that have occurred might simply be the unavoidable byproducts of the vast increase in the amount of K-12 testing in the US:

The issue might be as simple as supply and demand. With "accountability" the buzzword in education, the demand for testing has skyrocketed during the last several years..."Because of accountability and the movement across the country with No Child Left Behind, we have relied on two or three very large companies for testing needs," said Ellen Cohan, associate superintendent for teaching and learning with the Forsyth County school system. "It must be overwhelming for them"...Stuart Kahl, president of Measured Progress, said the testing industry has started to expand to meet the demand...For instance, Kahl pointed to the Educational Testing Service. The Princeton, N.J.-based company once specialized in higher education entrance exams such as the SAT but has now entered the k-12 testing business.

Kahl said the biggest challenge facing the industry is time. He said the companies need to create individualized tests based on each state's curriculum. The companies used to have years to develop tests, he said, but that's changed. "Instead of taking three or four years to develop an assessment system, you've got three or four months," Kahl said.

When the deadline is that short, it's very difficult to make sure that the usual item review, field-testing, and QA processes are in place. What's more, the article doesn't even touch upon one of the most extreme imbalances of supply and demand in the field of testing - a severe shortage of psychometricians. To my knowledge, there have been no articles published about this, but I've been aware of the situation for years. I've yet to work at a place that wasn't hiring - and by hiring I mean "desperately looking for qualified psychometricians and research assistants" - and I know of no unemployed or under-employed psychometricians. I also know very few, especially ones in my age group, who haven't changed jobs in the last five years, because there are so many positions open, with more being created each year.

One reason for this shortage is that, despite the recent explosion of tests testing, the requirements for being a psychometrician haven't been modified, and large-scale high-stakes testing requires lots of psychometricians (and research assistants who are studying to be psychometricians). A psychometrician must possess a Ph.D. (a Masters isn't enough), and it's almost always in Quantitative Psychology or Educational Measurement (or, something very similar with a different name).

In the year 1999-2000, 44,808 people received doctoral degrees in the U.S. Over 1600 were in English; over 1100 were in Mathematics; almost 7000 were in Education. In Psychology, which is the field most psychometrians receive degrees in, 4,310 students received Psychology Ph.D.;'s, and and according to this APA report, in that same year, there were over 5,700 students enrolled in Psychology Ph.D.-level programs in the US. Would you care to guess how many of those enrolled Psychology Ph.D.'s were in my field?

Thirteen.

Yup, that's sure to keep up with the rising tide of testing. Meanwhile, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) alone has 35 research-related position postings - and that's just the positions that are officially listed by an organization that's willing to do a nationwide search.

Sure, we can look at students from other programs, such as Educational Measurement, but the numbers don't improve much. Here's a survey of those receiving doctorates in 2000; out of the 41,368 students sampled who received Ph.D.'s that year, in addition to the 8 Quantitative Psychology Ph.D.s (shown on page 103), there were 13 Ph.D.'s awarded in Psychometrics, 55 awarded in Educational Research Methods (p.104), and 45 awarded in Educational Assessment. What's more, this document shows trends over the last 10 years, and no increase in these numbers is visible.

You know all these new K-12 testing jobs? Some of them pay very well, and almost all of them pay much better than academic positions. No new Psychometrics professors means no new Psychometrics students.

Bottom line? I'm surprised we haven't seen more errors, and more articles critical of these errors. As the demand for testing increases, companies are operating with sub-optimal staffing, and the trained psychometricians who are out there aren't being given enough time to do their jobs correctly. Would national regulation help? I seriously doubt it. A national regulatory board could help develop national guidelines, but there are already informal "industry-wide" standards that any legitimate company would impose upon itself. National regulation also takes power away from the states. It's not that testing companies are deliberately trying to cut corners and produce error-ridden tests - quite the opposite. Without an increase in the number of professional psychometricians to staff the testing companies, all the regulations in the world won't do much good.

Challenging children to readE.D. Hirsch,

Challenging children to read

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (of "Cultural Literacy" fame) is back in the news in this Rocky Mountain News article about effective programs for getting kids past the "fourth-grade reading slump." Why is the teaching of reading comprehension such a "recalcitrant problem", as Hirsch puts it?

...because the more words you already know, the easier it is to learn the meaning of the new ones you encounter when you tread, and by the time they come to school, children differ greatly in how many words they already know...It's when they begin encountering lots of new words in their textbooks that the gap in language skills is revealed. And it widens over time.

How wide can this gap become?

In another article in the journal, "Early Catastrophe: The 30 million word gap by age 3," Betty Hart and Todd Risley document the enormous difference in early language experience. They recorded more than 1,300 hours of parent-child conversation for 42 children from age 7 months to three years, whose parents included university professors, middle-income working parents, and parents on welfare.

Professors talk a lot, so it isn't surprising that in an average recorded hour they said more and used more different words than the adults in the other groups. But even their children - not older than 3, remember - used more different words in an hour than the adults in the other groups. By age 3 or 4, researchers estimated, the professionals' children had heard a total of tens of millions of words more than the children in the least verbal families. And the effects were still apparent when the researchers did a follow-up study of the children in third grade.

Tens of millions. It's staggering to contemplate, and it explains why rote vocabulary drills may not have much of an effect on kids once they master the basics of reading. These drills simply don't allow the kids who have fallen behind to assimilate new words quickly enough. What does Hirsch think will work?

Start early, Hirsch suggests, "to build word and world knowledge." Apart from the time spent specifically on decoding skills, where it is appropriate to limit vocabulary to build confidence, much of the time spent on language arts is a wasted opportunity to introduce children to new words and concepts. When teachers read aloud, the material should be a couple of years ahead of the children's own reading skills, and should be followed by class discussion of the new topics for further practice...

A really good school program, Hirsch concludes, is inherently egalitarian and compensatory. It has a bigger effect on low-income children because they typically have more to learn, and if the program is effective they begin to catch up. A weak program, on the other hand, does more damage to low-income students because they need more from school than their more advantaged peers.

Which is a nice way of saying that schools that dumb down reading requirements for poorly-performing, low-income students under the guise of protecting their "self-esteem" are doing far more harm than good.

"To the cheers of dozens

"To the cheers of dozens of students"

The Los Angeles school board voted on April 9 to "explore" establishing a moratorium on the high school exit exam currently operational for LA's seniors (I posted about this previously). This isn't the same as explicitly allowing schools to graduate students who fail the exam, but it's a step in that direction:

To the cheers of dozens of students and parents who are fighting to overturn the California High School Exit Exam as a graduation requirement, the Los Angeles school board voted Tuesday to explore establishing a moratorium on the high-stakes test.

The board came short of making a commitment to issue diplomas to students who fail the test in defiance of state law, although board member Genethia Hudley Hayes suggested the idea and said she personally would support such civil disobedience.

Even if this is the right decision, it's being made for the wrong reason:

The Coalition for Educational Justice, which led the campaign for a moratorium on the exit exam, asserts the test is "racist" and "class-biased," noting that 72 percent of African Americans and 70 percent of Latino Americans throughout the state failed the test in the spring of 2002.

Translation: "The schools are failing record numbers of these students, but it's easier for us to give them a diploma than make substantive changes that would improve their skills." Think I'm being cynical? Look at the exam specifics here. The exam is targeted to 10th-grade standards, students need only a 55% correct to pass on math and 60% correct to pass on English, and schools must supply tutorials to students who fail. What's more, students are allowed eight attempts to pass this exam. And 72% of Los Angeles's African American students cannot satisfy these lax requirements. In this light, it's obvious that this moratorium is a desperate attempt to hide the fact that the schools are performing miserably, that students are performing miserably, and that Los Angeles schools would like to graduate students who cannot read at the 10th-grade level.

But hey, as long as the students are cheering, who cares if they can read?

The worlds of war and

The worlds of war and psychometrics collide

Fellow psychometrician Tim sent me a link to a Washington Post story about the lavish life of Iraq's former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz. He's a fluent English speaker, an educated man, and the only Christian among the elite of Saddam's Baath party. He's been out of sight since our troops neared Baghdad. And buried in the article is this fascinating little snippet:

In a ground floor office are photographs of a man in his forties who appears to be Aziz's son. White business cards bearing the name Ziad Tariq Aziz are on a large oak desk. On the floor is a box of cigars, a backgammon set and a bottle of Cartier cologne. Brochures advertising Smith & Wesson and Remington firearms are scattered on the office floor. A Princeton Review test preparation book, titled "Cracking the GMAT," is marked with notes in the margins.

Wow. From Princeton Review to Baghdad. Just imagine, this senior Iraqi official, poring over his test prep book,scribbling in the margins, and fretting about the GMAT just like thousands of US students do every year. Wonder if PR will use him as a success story if he pops up at a business school in the US?

Update:Hey, here it is on The Best of the Web today as well.

Going out with a bang

Going out with a bang

Queen’s University education professor Mark Danby is retiring at the end of this year, and he plans to go out with a bang. It seems he opposes the Ontario Teacher Qualifying Test - it is, he says, "an absolute insult to the integrity of the programs we’ve had at this school” - so he is going to help all of his students cheat on the exam:

Mark Danby says teacher candidates shouldn’t have to write the government-imposed Ontario Teacher Qualifying Test...Danby encouraged students who have written the test to give him the questions, which he’ll then compile and distribute to students who have not yet completed it. Danby said he’s retiring at the end of the school year, so he’s not worried about the repercussions of his actions.

Wow. So what's with all the fuss about this four-hour test?

Teacher candidates must pass the test before they receive their certificate from the Ontario College of Teachers. The test is graded on a scale of 305 to 390. A passing mark is a 355. If a student fails the test, they can rewrite it in June, but until the results come back, they are unable to teach.

More than one attempt is allowed, and presumably they only need to get half the items correct to pass it. Doesn't sound like that high of a standard to me. Some students claim that anyone who can't teach would have "weeded out by now,” which is giving a great deal of credit to the school of education (much like our student columnist gave to Montana's academic departments in yesterday's posting).

The real problem seems to be that the exam is administered by Educational Testing Services (ETS):

The fact that an American company is responsible for testing Canadian teacher candidates was a point of contention for students at yesterday’s forum. “It’s just too ridiculous to comment on,” said Queen’s education student Shawn Kyte. “It’s [the test] marked by college students in the states.”

Ah, it's by ETS. There's the problem. I found information about the exam here, and here's the info booklet (.pdf format). The test isn't your usual test of math and verbal skills; instead, it assesses "Professional Knowledge" and "Knowledge of Teaching Practices" using 36 MCQ's and four case studies. Interesting.

A case study example is shown on Pages 7 and 8 of the document, with correct answers on the following pages. The sample multiple-choice question are on page 18. The test seems to cover a phenomenally-wide domain, and, notwithstanding the complaints of its American origin, it is specifically tailored to Ontario education specifications. Example: Under "Professional Knowledge" are the skills of "Understanding the structure and purposes of the Ontario Curriculum, including achievement levels and charts, expectation, and strands" and "Understanding how the mandate of a school system (French or English, Public or Catholic) affects program planning and delivery."

However, the questions, while not intellectually taxing, seem mind-numbing and rather arbitrary. It's difficult to see how a "one-best-answer" situation can come from asking about the right thing to do in dealing with a student in a teaching situation. The case studies might be more useful, because it gives the test taker a chance to really use their skills, but the MCQ's seem more difficult because you have less information to work with. For example, consider the following (taken from page 18 of the information booklet):

Duc is a student whose family has recently come to Canada from Southeast Asia. His teacher, Ms. Chen, is trying to understand why he never looks at her when she is speaking to him. Which of the following is most important for Ms. Chen to determine in this situation?

(A) What materials might help Duc learn about the new culture in which he is living

(B) If Duc's behavior is a reflection of a cultural norm in his former country

(C) How well Duc communicates with the other students in his class

(D) How well Duc understands classroom discussions and one-on-one conversations.

The correct answer is B. I think this is fairly difficult item, but not for the reasons the authors intended. I don't believe that the MCQ format is best for measuring this type of skill. To begin with, on an MCQ each of the item options should be parallel in form, and the test taker should be able to order the options on a single dimension, so that the "one best answer" stands out. However, there's no reason a teacher couldn't perform all four options here, and in real life the "best answer" might be the option that is least easy for the teacher to assess. There's no logical reason that these four options couldn't be performed in tandem, and in real life the "best answer" might be whatever is easiest, cheapest, or quickest to do.

The stem is also flawed - what does it mean for Ms. Chen to "determine" something in this situation? Does that mean find the reason for his behavior, or find the one thing that will help modify his behavior? Yes, discovering (B) would explain it but not fix it, while finding the materials in (A) could fix the behavior regardless of origin. I suppose you'd have to do (B) before knowing if (A) would work, but if the culture change isn't the reason behind his behavior, then the information in the stem about Duc being a recent immigrant is a red herring. In fact, if it's not a red herring, then it basically gives away the answer, if the test taker understands the question to mean, "What's the cause of Duc's behavior?" The teacher's name - Ms. Chen - is confusing window dressing. Why wouldn't an Asian teacher already know about a possible Asian cultural tradition? I mean, perhaps she's not a recent immigrant, and perhaps she's not from his country, but with her last name, who can tell? Is there a point to her being identified as Asian as well? This isn't something the test taker should have to figure out.

I don't mean to pick apart ETS here - and I certainly don't agree with Professor Danby's decision to help his students cheat (his reputation may be safe, but what about theirs?) - but perhaps this exam isn't doing the best job of measuring what the Ontario government would like it to measure. And if the school of education is as good as the teachers and students claim, who decided that this exam was necessary in the first place?

Universal exams vs. a diverse

Universal exams vs. a diverse population

There's an interesting little opinion in the University of Montana's Kaiman Online today about the standardized writing assessment that is required for graduation from the U of M. I assume the author, Brittany Hageman, is a student, and her editorial begins with the much-repeated urban legend that Einstein would have failed a language-arts exam. Believe it or not, this is the second article I've found today that repeats this not only as gospel, but apparently considers it a legitimate criticism of testing. The first article is about a touchy-feely homeschool collaborative in Massachusetts that is determined not to teach things "by the book". Either you agree with the collaborative's spokesperson that children should "learn through relationships" with teachers who aren't "too bossy", or you don't, so I'm not going to address that article here.

Back to the Montana article. At first I figured it was just standard anti-testing rhetoric. But halfway through, Ms. Haigman poses a startling question:

...it’s completely silly that the University of Montana requires all students in majors ranging from journalism to math to pass the same exam without taking into consideration writing deviations in students’ specific majors...Students who continue to fail the mother of all essays (we’re talking flashbacks to high school, SATs type of bad) have to keep taking the two-hour proctored exam until they squeak by.

Granted, it is important for college students to be able to write analytically and form a coherent essay, but shouldn’t the people who aren’t up-to-par already be weeded out? UM’s lastditch effort of making sure the University did it’s job in creating well-rounded students, educated with a strong liberal arts background, is only pissing off seniors who just want to get out of here.

Ooh, ooh. Ms. Hageman, you're onto something here. Go with it. Don't you think the existence of this exam might be evidence that UM's various programs aren't weeding out students who cannot write a coherent essay? Doesn't this sound like perhaps the university realizes that some departments are failing their students in this regard, and this is the best way they've come up with to rectify the situation? Doesn't this sound like some departments might be "celebrating the diversity" of their students rather than teaching them that, yes, any college graduate should be able to write a coherent essay, regardless of their major? Perhaps political pressure in some departments prevents any "weeding out" of students?

Ms. Hageman also notes that:

Now, whether or not a handful of good students have “fallen through the cracks,” there are a number of kids at the University who have taken 300-level writing classes, passed with flying colors, yet managed to fail the assessment. Even students in the journalism school, students trained in writing, are failing this.

Think, Ms. Hageman. Isn't it possible that something besides the writing exam is at fault here? What's being asked of students on a two-hour-long essay that they haven't learned in four years of higher education? Can the exam possibly be that hard? Or are the writings skills being taught that poorly in Montana?

"Every year, in some ways,

"Every year, in some ways, it is a new beginning"

Here's one math teacher who's doing it right - and the test scores validate his methods. Middle school teacher Jason Kamras uses some ingenuity and his laptop to create a game to help students learn mathematical concepts and formulas - and they love it:

The 18 students in the Sousa Middle School math class all look like they're paying attention and interested as the contestants come forward, two at a time, to play the game. Kamras's colleagues say this type of teaching is typical of a creative style that hooks students' interest and inspires them to learn. They say he spends hours carefully planning lessons such as this one. And after contests such as the math game, he prints out individual award certificates for each member of the winning team...

Kamras said he carefully plans his lessons and regularly considers what he can do better. "My brothers asked me, 'Why is it still so difficult? You're now in your sixth year teaching,' " he said. "Every year, in some ways, it is a new beginning. You're always thinking, 'Next year I can do this a little differently' -- that constant reflection and reinventing"...

After two years at the school, Kamras's students showed strong gains on their Stanford 9 standardized test scores, according to Principal William A. Lipscomb. The school's test scores are depressed, with many students scoring in the lowest category of the test, below basic, in math. "The percentage of sixth-graders [all of whom Mr. Kamras taught] who scored Below Basic dropped nearly 20 points between the fall and spring administrations of the test," Lipscomb wrote in a letter nominating Kamras for the award. "This is the greatest drop in the Below Basic percentage that the sixth grade has seen in all six years of SAT 9 administration at Sousa."

One man, making a difference. If only every kid was lucky enough to have him as a teacher.

"A'd and B'd and C'd

"A'd and B'd and C'd to death''

Teachers in Tennessee speak out about the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP), and many are frustrated with it:

Eighth grade English teacher Victoria Hunt doesn't begin her classes with a discussion of reading assignments or critiques of her pupils' writing. Her Wright Middle School students open practice test books and drill on multiple choice questions. Like many teachers, she fears the federal government's push for increased school accountability places a greater emphasis on standardized tests than on basic classroom learning. "It takes away an extra novel we could read, takes away time from things you feel you're best at teaching,'' she said. "And afterward, it takes away the kids. They're so weary after TCAP. They've been A'd and B'd and C'd to death.''...

"It makes you or breaks you as a teacher, as a school. There's a tremendous amount of pressure,'' said Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Lana Seivers. Across the country, fear of poor student performance has made it "all too common that schools are being turned into test prep programs,'' said Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.-based organization opposed to increased standardized testing...

Ah, there's our old friend Monty, front and center as usual. Not once have I heard him provide evidence for his claims that was not anecdotal. Not once has he provided evidence to support his claim that most teachers are unable to weave test preparation instruction into the general curriculum of imparting basic skills. But he's on every journalist's Rolodex, nonetheless.

But supporters of the federal push for accountability say the tests are essential to knowing where money and effort must be directed to help struggling schools...In Tennessee last year, the state Department of Education put 98 schools on notice to improve the basic skills of their students in English and math, or risk a takeover by the department...

For example, officials at Caldwell Elementary School in Memphis - widely acclaimed as a success amid a troubled school system - were recently accused of cheating to boost test scores. Principal Lirah Sabir, who retired following the controversy, is accused of excluding weak students on test days, doctoring answer sheets and banning monitors from classrooms. "I'm not condoning the actions in the least, but it's human nature when the stakes are higher for people to find ethical and some not-so-ethical ways to adapt to the pressure,'' Seivers said. "... Sometimes things that are this high-pressure bring out the worst in people.''

Yes, and one could argue that it's also "human nature" for students to cheat on every exam they take in school, not just the high-stakes ones, because, in a sense, they're all high-stakes from the kid's point of view. I don't think Ms. Seivers would be willing to accept this as evidence that kids should never be tested, though, so why are we being asked to accept it as a valid criticisms of tests here?

I blogged about the Caldwell scandal a couple of weeks ago. Our dear friend Monty was quoted there, too, and the article described the cheating as evidence of the "dark side" of our focus on high-stakes testing. Seemed to me then, as it still does now, that it's more likely the dark side of the types of educators and principals to whom we are entrusting our accountability systems. Their excuses just don't hold water.

Cassie Sebastian, a 7th-grade language arts teacher at Ooltewah Middle School near Chattanooga, also spent a large portion of her classtime each week reviewing for the exams - an agenda with which she doesn't agree. "TCAP does not test responsibility, doesn't test the character of the student, and those are the things we incorporate into the classroom,'' Sebastian said. Seivers, a former teacher and schools superintendent, understands the frustration educators. She says she'd like to see the TCAPs replaced with an assessment system that includes benchmarks, something she says "any good teacher I have ever seen'' knows about his or her children.

Oh, so Ms. Sebastian thinks we should assess character? Considering the flak we get just for trying to assess math in an objective fashion, I'd hate to see what would happen if we tried to roll out a test relating to student character.

But I don't really blame these test critics. Well, okay, I do blame the journalist for not interviewing any pro-testing teachers (who might be able to relay useful teaching tips to their more pessimistic peers), and I do blame the journalist for not realizing that other people besides FairTest have valid comments about K-12 testing. I understand that the teachers are under pressure, and they feel responsible for their kids. Where we diverge, though, is that I believe that pressure should have always been there. It shouldn't be a new thing that schools worry about the implications of failing their kids.

I do agree with Ms. Seivers that benchmarks are necessary, but her criticism implies that (a) there are none in place in Tennessee (this report suggests otherwise), and (b) benchmarks cannot be integrated into high-stakes standardized tests. But a benchmark is just a fancy way of saying, "This is a skill to be mastered," and the state exams should be tied to such benchmarks. If they aren't, there's a big problem, but the problem is not inherent in standardized testing.

Here's a page that links to many different sets of benchmarks and standards in use in K-12 education. Suggested math benchmarks (provided in this document) are "1. Uses a variety of strategies in the problem-solving process. 2. Understands and applies basic and advanced properties of the concepts of numbers. 3. Uses basic and advanced procedures while performing the processes of computation." There's no reason that these can't be assessed with high-stakes standardized tests. I don't know the structure of the TCAP, nor what standards were set for it. But to suggest that a standardized test must be removed before benchmarks can be assessed is an incorrect argument that just muddies the water.

OopsieStudents in Grades 1-3, 5,

Oopsie

Students in Grades 1-3, 5, and 7 in Georgia's public school system won't be taking the Criterion-Referenced Compentency Test this year - because live exam questions were printed in the practice booklets for those grades. The cause of the error is given as "contract problems and printing errors," which seems like an understatement. Any test production company that mixes up live and practice test items has serious problems with their item bank and item retrieval processes, and I wonder if the "contract problems" mentioned here are that the company refuses to fix the error in time, or claims that this was not their responsibilty. It's good that that State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox feels that "Putting our students and teachers through the rigors of a test that we know to be compromised would be both unethical and irresponsible, " but I'd want to know how this system was allowed to get so screwed up in the first place. To be honest, with five of the eight grades known to be compromised, I'd be worried about the security and scoring accuracy of the other three.

How bizarre...Hmm, seems the transition

How bizarre...

Hmm, seems the transition from Blogger to Blogger Pro was not as seamless as I'd hoped. I noticed by scrolling through this page that various posts have been deleted, at random. The comments still remain, so I know what posts are missing, but the posts have been replaced with short snippets of meaningless text in the Blogger Pro editor. Let's hope the problem does not affect any future posts...

What the heck are you

What the heck are you doing reading this blog right now?

I mean, really. Haven't you turned on FoxNews today? Have you seen that footage of the Saddam statue being toppled, mangled, and decapitated? Have you see the joy in the faces of the Iraqi men as the coalition tanks rolled into town? Have you seen the photos of Marines being kissed by babies? Have you seen the daisies placed in the helmets of the liberating forces?

What a day. What a wonderful, wonderful day. What a day on which psychometrics is pretty much the least relevant topic I can think of. So go read Little Green Footballs, or Instapundit, or One Hand Clapping. And rejoice.

And to those brave men and women in our armed forces, a great big MWAAH! kiss goes out to you!

(Photo via Glenn Frazier)

In a world that makes

In a world that makes sense...

Love the lead-in line for this column- "As reading-test scores improve, members of the Latino Caucus duck under their desks, and a state education official ducks questions." This is a follow-up column to my earlier posting on English-immersion vs.bilingual education in improving test scores. Columnist Jill Stewart wants to know why the Latino press and Latino politicians seem to be avoiding the issue:

I’m talking about the truly staggering statewide test scores released by O’Connell, which show Spanish-speaking children and other immigrants are learning to read, write and comprehend English at a sustained pace California educators say is unprecedented. After two decades of downwardly spiraling achievement and increasing illiteracy rates among California’s Spanish-speaking students, 2003 is the second year of a new test showing big, historically unusual jumps in English fluency and comprehension...

To many, English literacy marks the single most important toehold Latinos must have in order to grow a strong middle class in California, and everybody agrees we desperately need that. Sacramento reacted in typical fashion. The Latino Legislative Caucus suddenly went invisible, making no comments on the amazing statewide gains by 860,000 children whose first language is not English, 34 percent of whom, according to the CELDT test, are now A and B students, like any suburban child. Four of five Latino legislators I sought out for comment on the great scores of Latino schoolchildren never called back. La Opinion, the biggest Spanish-language newspaper in California, didn’t quote a single prideful Latino elected official dying to get in on the good news.

Could it be that they don't consider it to be good news, simply because they aren't interested in education reform that doesn't fit their ideologies? Ms. Stewart thinks so:

See, many in the Latino Legislative Caucus of California are still very upset that California voters approved Proposition 227, which largely banned the failed statewide “bilingual education” program that kept kids in Spanish for five years and left them too far behind in English for many ever to catch up. Not a single Latino politician in California backed Proposition 227 because it required that children be taught using immersion English. When voters in 1998 approved Proposition 227, the hip, urban Latino politicians in Los Angeles predicted children would be so traumatized by English that they would cry their way through school and be so unable to understand that academic scores would plummet.

But the opposite occurred the year immersion English was launched, and the year after that, and the year after that. The kids loved it. Immersion English was coupled with an intensive return to phonics, which the bilingual-education crowd virulently opposed as another assault on Latino kids...In a world that makes sense, the adults would have come around by now.

But is this the whole story? I received this commentary via Bill Evers and Mike McKeown that casts doubt on the large test score difference. I have no link to it, so I'm reproducing it in full:

[Note: I received the following comment on the Jill Stewart article from a California-based testing specialist. --Bill Evers]

Thanks for the [Jill Stewart piece]. It captures a lot of the politics surrounding the release of CELDT test scores.

As for the psychometrics, the analysis featured in the [State Superindent of Public Instruction's] press release does not hold up under scrutiny. They reported tremendous gain scores [from 11 % to 32 %, or a "tripling") based on a "matched sample" of scores from 2001 to 2002. Unfortunately, the matched sample consisted of less than 1/2 the total sample, and it was biased in that kids who scored high in 2001 were not in the matched sample since they were reclassified before the 2002 CELDT was administered. This drives down the 2001 number, resulting in the tremendous gain scores reported, which unfortunately are artificial due to the sampling that was done.

A fairer representation of the CELDT results is to use the total samples from both 2001 and 2002, and the result is a gain from 25 % to 34 %, a gain of 9 points that I would characterize as quite good (but not the headline grabber that a 21 point gain portends). A 9 point gain is sufficient to claim success in general for ELL programs in California. But, the contrast between results for kids in bilingual programs (Prop 227 waivered classrooms) and other ELL instructional programs is indeed eyepopping. The bilingual programs now enroll less than 10 percent of all ELLs, and only 16 % score high (in the top two categories) on the CELDT, compared to 36 % for all other ELL instructional programs. That's a 20 point difference. Further, bilingual program kids grades K-3 (where the bulk of waivered classrooms reside) show only 10 % in the top two categories on the CELDT. This is the cleanest data I have seen documenting that kids in bilingual programs (which really should be called monolingual Spanish programs, rather than bilingual) simply do not acquire English language at the same rate as ELL kids enrolled in other ELL instructional programs.

So, it looks like an error in judgment was made when the score gains were first analyzed - but the recomputed results still support the claim that English immersion is the better program for helping kids learn English in school.

HooWAHDo I have any Georgia

HooWAH

Do I have any Georgia Bulldogs out there in Readerland?

Yet another rebuttal to the

Yet another rebuttal to the Arizona State Testing Study

Fellow psychometrician Greg C. sent a "scoop" my way - Hoover Institute Fellows Margaret E. Raymond and Eric A. Hanushek have conducted a detailed analysis of student performance, and what they found directly contradicts the Arizona State Testing Study. While the ASU study concluded, in essence, that testing impedes learning, Raymond and Hanushek found that better state accountability led to greater gains on the NAEP Math scores. Their results were accompanied by direct criticism of the ASU study:

Raymond and Hanushek also evaluated [the ASU study] and found serious flaws in Amrein and Berliner’s research. “The findings are astonishing,” Raymond and Hanushek said. “Once correct statistical techniques are applied to the data they used, the results are opposite to nearly every one of their conclusions.”

Raymond and Hanushek’s analysis showed that test scores actually improved at a faster rate than in no-accountability states in almost all of the states where Amrein and Berliner claimed to find decreases. In New Mexico, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, where Amrein and Berliner found decreases, Raymond and Hanushek found that high-stakes testing was introduced too early to make a valid before and after comparison.

The fatal flaw of Amrein and Berliner’s methods, assert Raymond and Hanushek, is their point of comparison. “If one wants to assess the effect of high-stakes testing, the obvious comparison is
between states that adopted accountability systems and those that did not. Amrein and Berliner’s decision to compare the gains in high-stakes states with the national average violates a most basic principle of social-science research.”

The published study is not yet available, but unlike the ASU study, it was submitted to blind peer review. Wonder if it will, like the ASU study, be featured in the NYT as well? I'm not holding my breath.

Update:

I'm no longer on Bill Ever's mailing list (I need to rectify that by signing up with my new email address), but Bas Braams, who is, sent me a .pdf file of the Raymond & Hanushek study. Bas commented that R&H "do a fine job on Amrein Berliner", but questioned whether their statistically significant results are in fact meaningful (a topic that I've discussed previously).

R&H note, among other things, that the ASU study was not blind-reviewed, but was instead shown to scholars at other education schools (who were most likely sympathetic) with full disclosure. This alone could account for the fact that no one commented on the study's unorthodox method of comparing high-stakes schools to the national average, rather than to school that did not implement high-stakes testing. When R&H compare the high-stakes states' NAEP scores to those from no-accountability states, the direction of the score advantages reverse from those reported in the ASU study, which makes this a very important rebuttal to that study.

However, while the R&H results show that NAEP scores increase significantly more in high-stakes states than in low/no-stakes ones, the difference is not that large in a practical sense (they're in the single-digits, percentagewise). So is that educationally significant? I don't know. This does show that the ASU conclusions may be completely wrong, but this doesn't seem like proof that high-stakes accountability rules are vital to education reform. As a pro-testing person, I'm cautious, but optimistic.

Update #2: The link above is the abridged version. Here's the unabridged version at Education Next. Thanks, Bas.

Sexual harassment?Little Sol Santana II,

Sexual harassment?

Little Sol Santana II, a seventh-grader, is in hot water at school. Seems he stuck his tongue out at a girl - and is now being charged with sexual harassment:

Sal Santana II, a 12-year-old Magoffin Middle School student, said he stuck his tongue out at a girl who declined his invitation to be his girlfriend. School district administrators viewed the incident as sexual harassment, suspended him for three days and are considering placing him in an alternative school...

"The teacher said he stuck his tongue out and moved it back and forth and waved at her like you were patting someone on the back and that that constitutes sexual harassment," Salvador Santana said. "She said the girl was upset and scared."

Not to make light of her "plight", but when you teach kids that they cannot respond to provocation in any way other than to "seek compromise" or "work with those in authority for a peaceful solution," it's not surprising that the girl in question had no recourse other than to run to the teachers and claim harassment. I'm almost certain she'd be charged with assault had she done what I did in the 7th-grade, when some foul-mouthed boy made a rude comment to me on the bus, which was whip off my wooden-soled Candies and whap him over the head with one of them. No permanent damage was done, unless you count the immediate and total attitude adjustment on his part. Another bully learned his lesson from my friend Janine when his leering face was blasted with a nice dose of White Rain aerosol spray. Too bad girls today are taught that a wagging tongue means instant victimization - and that they should run to the authorities rather than defend themselves.

Joanne Jacobs has the story, and more, on her FoxNews blog highlights.

Update: Regular Reader Laura had this comment:

In my day one of the male teachers or coaches would have taken the boy aside on the first offense and said something like, "Don't do that. It's ugly and rude," and so forth. Second offense he'd have gotten THE PADDLE and third offense wouldn't have happened.

Oh, but that wouldn't fly today. The male teachers and coaches are probably under suspicion of being harassers themselves, just by virtue of being male; they wouldn't be allowed to impart some "man-to-man" wisdom to male students. And paddling? Oh my God, you mean actually discipline a student with corporal punishment? Why, that's so brutal and oppressive. It's much more humane and effective to just kick the kid out of school for the first offense, rather than lecturing him, giving him a non-lethal yet effective punishment, or just giving him a second chance not to repeat the act. At least, that's the way the educational community sees it - once every kid has been suspended for harmless immature behavior, the teachers won't have any more discipline problems, will they?

More stupid professor tricksThe Anti-Idiotarian

More stupid professor tricks

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler caught a great article from the Tampa Tribune entitled, "Many Professors Protest War More Than Students". In it, washed-up leftie professors are upset about the fact that this current crop of students aren't buying into their bogus revoluationary fantasies:

- It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar demonstrations in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods.

Irvine Valley College in Southern California sent faculty members a memo that warned them not to discuss the war unless it was specifically related to the course material. When professors cried censorship, the administration explained that the request had come from students.

Oh, how awful. Students are having to remind their professors they they are there to teach, not protest the war on the public dole, and the professors are crying about "censorship" (because, as every good leftie knows, "free speech" means "free of any and all consequences"). Misha put it best: "Ain't much fun when your sheep turn out to be rams, is it? Mheheheheh."

I found most of the article to be amusing, until I reached this paragraph:

Even in antiwar bastions like Cambridge, Berkeley and Madison, the protests have been more town than gown. At Berkeley, where Vietnam protesters shouted, ``Shut it down!'' under clouds of tear gas, most action comes from solo operators handing out black armbands. The shutdown was in San Francisco, and the crowd was grayer. All this dismays many professors. ``We used to like to offend people,'' said Martha Saxton, a professor of women's studies at Amherst, as she sat discussing the faculty protest with students this week. ``We loved being bad, in the sense that we were making a statement. Why is there no joy now?''

Okay, how obnoxious is it that a professor is immature enough to want to be "bad" and offensive, and dumb enough to say this outright in an interview? Is this supposed to encourage more parents to want to pay tuition to Amherst? So their children can learn to be "bad" before they learn anything else?

And what about all those left-wing speech code restrictions, of which Amherst has plenty? Certainly, few students at Amherst today can say that they enjoy "offending" people, nor can many of them put it into practice, not with the rule against expressing "disparagement or abuse to any member of the community for reasons that include, but are not limited to, race, color, religion, national origin, ethnic identification, age, political affiliation or belief, sexual orientation, gender, economic status, or physical or mental disability." That's pretty comprehensive. Who is left to offend?

Oh, that's right. Students who actually come to college to learn subject matter from intelligent professors and who resent having political agendas forced on them - they can be insulted, because they don't find "joy" in "making a statement" during a time of war.

Update: Thomas Sowell expresses his thoughts on the matter here. Best line: "Being clever, daring, and morally one-up are very important to those who live by words -- certainly more important than being right, and more important than defending the society which makes their freedom possible and tolerates so much of their nonsense."

The universe is against meFor

The universe is against me

For starters, it's snowing like crazy outside. What did I do to deserve this? I don't even know where my gloves are, and I had to borrow a snow shovel from a friend because I haven't bought one yet because I moved into my house in, you know, APRIL. Grrr.

On a less ridiculous front, I've got a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand from all the scraping and sanding and painting that I did. Guess I pushed myself a wee bit too hard when getting the house ready. I'm now in a splint - typing is okay, working the mouse is not so easy. Luckily, my boyfriend is moving in this weekend, and I anticipate that jobs such as taking out the garbage and washing dishes will be, um, certain to aggravate my inflammation, so he'll just have to shoulder those tasks. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Making exceptions on the FCATThere's

Making exceptions on the FCAT

There's a new coalition out there - and this is one is pushing for Florida to allow seniors who fail the FCAT to graduate:

''I believe firmly in the FCAT, but I think we're seeing that this thing is not perfect and we should be willing to consider some alternative,'' said Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla, a Miami Republican who has been negotiating in recent days with Miami Sen. Frederica Wilson. The apparent compromise -- coming after days of sparring between black lawmakers who believe the FCAT is racially biased and Hispanics who think it is unfair to non-English speakers -- would allow students who fail the FCAT to earn a diploma if they succeed on a college entrance exam such as the SAT.

Say what? First, the FCAT and SAT aren't intended to measure the same thing. The SAT is not necessarily a good measure of whether Florida's standards are being met, or whether Florida's educational curriculum changes are working. Second, the student has to pay to take the SAT (unless they can get a fee waiver for genuine need), while the FCAT is free. Third, why is the FCAT a problem, but the SAT is okay? They're both standardized tests covering Verbal and Mathematical reasoning, and last year there were groups in Florida claiming that the SAT is racially biased. I think this is a classic case of test opponents wanting to have it both ways - when they want to criticize a test other than the SAT, they'll forgo the claims of SAT bias.

And here I must digress for a little discussion of the term "bias", because I'm tired of seeing it printed in newspapers in an incorrect manner and with no data to support it. Here is, I bet, what all the "test bias" ruckus is about:

The potential effect in South Florida is dramatic. Miami-Dade officials estimate that nearly one-fourth of the district's seniors -- or about 5,200 -- will be unable to graduate because of their FCAT scores. About 4,400 of those would meet all other requirements for graduation except the FCAT. Of Broward's total senior class of 14,103, 2,623 -- about one in five -- still need to pass one or both sections of the FCAT. Broward administrators did not provide projections, but if the Miami-Dade percentages apply, the FCAT requirement alone will prevent almost 1,800 students from graduating.

In other words, Miami-Dade has 1,800 high school seniors who can't pass, with multiple tries, a test targeted to 10th-graders. While the article doesn't mention failure rates by ethnic group, I bet that fewer black and Hispanics are passing the exam, and that is where the charges of bias are coming from.

However, group mean differences have nothing to do with bias. What's happening here is that the use of the FCAT is having a different impact on certain groups of students - when the exam is used in this manner, certain groups are more negatively affected than others. This is a neutral statement, by the way, and is not in any way a criticism of the test. After all, if there were a standardized test for airline pilots, you'd be happy if people who didn't know how to fly a plane were "negatively impacted" by the test results. If more blacks and Hispanics are failing the test, the correct response is, "Why is this happening?" not, "This is unacceptable - get rid of the test." I agree that it's unacceptable, but it also may be perfectly accurate, in that black and Hispanic students are not being taught what they need to know at the high school level.

One of the more common correct definitions of bias is that different regression lines are needed to fit two groups being compared, but I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case for the FCAT. I discuss other definitions of bias here and here, and I haven't seen evidence of those types of bias, either. Group mean differences are neither necessary nor sufficient indicators of test bias, and I wish that at least the journalists who cover educational stories would master this concept.

There is apparently one study suggesting that English-only standardized tests do not accurately measure the performance of non-fluent students in Miami-Dade, but I haven't read that study. According to this article, the study found that immigrant students scored better on tests given in their native language, even after several years of English instruction. This isn't proof of bias, either, and again, I'm going to reject the conclusion drawn by advocacy organizations and ask - why aren't we teaching these kids to read more effectively? If Hispanics are being affected by this more so than students with a first-language other than Spanish, why is that the case? I think it's perfectly logical to conclude that perhaps Miami-Dade isn't teaching English very well to these students.

Before we leave the concept of bias, there's one more point to consider. Psychometric Theory, which is one of my bibles, makes the point that when weighing the importance of impact, one needs to consider whether the test should be fair to individuals, or to groups. The advocates pushing for special treatment are essentially claiming that the test should not be unfair - have a negative impact - on certain groups. But is a high school exit exam supposed to insure that all groups are treated the same, or is it supposed to insure only that individual students are treated fairly, in that only those possessing the necessary skills will pass the exam (regardless of group membership)? My vote is for the second definition, and I believe Governor Bush would agree with me:

''If these students want to receive a [Florida high school] diploma, we need to keep the same standards for all students -- passage of the grade 10 FCAT in English within six attempts,'' wrote Bush spokeswoman Alia Faraj in an e-mail to The Herald. Since college-entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT are not calibrated to the so-called Sunshine State Standards that govern Florida's education system, Bush's office said they would be ''inappropriate'' for granting diplomas.

Bush also opposed FCAT exceptions for students with poor English skills, saying they could look to alternatives such as GEDs and adult remedial courses. To change the FCAT requirement, said former Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan, an author of the Bush education plan, ``You end up graduating a group of students that are happy, but absolutely do not have the skills to compete. Brogan, now the president of Florida Atlantic University, argued that making exceptions for black and Hispanic students would damage the system. ''Once you begin to carve out students who don't have to do what everyone else has to do,'' he said, ``you in essence have no standard for high school graduation.''

Thank you. My point exactly. It's insulting - and counter-productive to educational reform - to claim that black students shouldn't be expected to pass the FCAT, especially given that the Manhattan Institute recently produced a study suggesting that the FCAT is an accurate measure of both student performance and schools’ effects on that performance (the original article is here) Therefore, dropping the FCAT for certain students is one way of hiding the failing of schools for those students - and make no mistake, they have indeed failed the students if large numbers of them require more than six attempts to pass a 10th-grade-level exam.

Safe HavensThis comic strip is

Safe Havens

This comic strip is about quirky high-school students and often pokes fun at standardized testing. I particularly like this strip from a few days ago...

Dangerous misinformationThe New York Daily

Dangerous misinformation

The New York Daily News launched a special investigation into the textbooks used in NYC's Islamic schools - and found that the textbooks are "sowing seeds of hatred":

The books, obtained during a three-month Daily News investigation that included visits to private Muslim schools, are rife with inaccuracies, sweeping condemnations of Jews and Christians, and triumphalist declarations of Islam's supremacy. In Long Island City, Queens, for example, fifth- and sixth-graders at the Ideal Islamic School on 12th St. learn that Allah has revealed that "the Jews killed their own prophets and disobeyed Allah."

At the Muslim Center Elementary School on Geranium Ave. in Flushing, Queens, a textbook for grades 6 through 8 teaches that Jews "subscribe to a belief in racial superiority. … Their religion even teaches them to call down curses upon the worship places of non-Jews whenever they pass by them! They arrogantly refer to anyone who is not Jewish as 'gentiles,' equating them with sin."

The book "What Islam Is All About" states that, "The Christians also worship statues." "Many" Jews and Christians, the book says, "lead such decadent and immoral lives that lying, alcohol, nudity, pornography, racism, foul language, premarital sex, homosexuality and everything else are accepted in their society, churches and synagogues."

Funny, last I checked, the first six weren't acceptable at any Christian church or Jewish temple that I've ever attended (and there have been many). Oh, and here's a "explanation" and "defense" of this rhetoric:

...the other publisher, Yahiya Emerick, who heads the Islamic Foundation of North America, a Queens-based nonprofit curriculum development project, stood by the language in his books, which are printed and distributed by International Books and Tapes Supply, or IBTS. "Islam, like any belief system, believes its program is better than others. I don't feel embarrassed to say that," he said. His books, Emerick stressed, "are directed to kids in a Muslim educational environment. They must learn and appreciate there are differences between what they have and what other religions teach. It's telling kids that we have our own tradition." He denied the books were inflammatory.

Here's an experiment. Try replacing the phrase "Jews and Christians" in the sentence, "Many Jews and Christians lead such decadent and immoral lives that lying, alcohol, nudity, pornography, racism, foul language, premarital sex, homosexuality and everything else are accepted in their society, churches and synagogues" with any other ethnic or religious group. Then publish that in a textbook for children attending schools in the US, and defend the use of it by saying that the children deserve to read textbooks that cater to "their own tradition."

What garbage. The Daily News says it best when they group selected quotes from various textbooks under the heading, "Texts' outrageous claims to confuse impressionable minds".

Affirmative action for the needyArmstrong

Affirmative action for the needy

Armstrong Williams has an interesting affirmative action article over at TownHall:

Affirmative action is designed to help even the playing field for black Americans. But the majority of people taking advantage of the program are the well-to-do suburban bourgeois who already have the wherewithal to get into a good college. Meanwhile, the most needy fall by the wayside....

There must come a point when black Americans expect to rise or fall on our own merits. We must acknowledge that we are not forever victims, just because we're black. This is not to belittle the crime of slavery. It is true that a shared history of slavery has created social hierarchies that reinforced negative stereotypes about black Americans and cut off certain economic opportunities. It is equally true that racial diversity is an important goal for our college campuses.

I would merely suggest that affirmative action be used to benefit the needy. Students from disadvantaged schools can excel if we provide the appropriate opportunities. Instead of blaming the families for failure, as is common in education, we need to focus on ensuring that the education system offers solutions.

Of course, what he seems to be describing here is not affirmative action as it has come to be defined, but a true leveling of the playing field by fixing the problems very early on in the K-12 system for those who need it. Such a leveling would reduce the need for affirmative action by producing a true equality. Is it a question of money? Not entirely. Money is necessary in order to improve schools, but curriculum changes and testing are also necessary for the change. Joanne Jacobs describes one plan for increasing the basic reading proficiency of disadvantaged students that has as much to do with a shift in the perception of education as it does with funding. Without such a shift, money poured into the public school system is likely to do no good.

Hee hee heeI just discovered

Hee hee hee

I just discovered that a fellow psychometrician, Brian Habing (who is a much happier person than his photo suggests), has a page on the web entitled "Pictures of Psychometricians". I've known Brian since we were ETS interns together, so I'm in two of the photos.

Photo labeled: "Not the official 1996 ETS summer intern photo" - I'm the goofball in the black t-shirt seated second from left with my head thrown way back. One of my best friends, Lori, was making scary hands behind my head. This house was gorgeous, by the way; I rented it the subsequent summer when I returned to ETS as a doctoral fellow.

Photo labeled: "Me, Jason, Kimberly Swygert, and Sue in the Tea Cup ride from hell" - I'm the cheery redhead facing the camera. A redhead no more, I am, but still cheery.

Affirmative action as placeboI had

Affirmative action as placebo

I had been avoiding commenting on the affirmative action cases in Michigan, partially because I don't have time to fully cover it, and partially because John Rosenberg of Discriminations is doing a fine job of keeping us all posted. However, I do feel I have to comment on a NYT editorial that John appropriately singles out for criticism. The author, Adam Cohen, makes a passionate but wrong-headed plea for racial preferences at the University of Michigan, based on the squalid conditions of a Detroit technical school:

The conservative argument that race does not matter in America falls particularly flat at Cass Tech. The school is in a rough patch of downtown Detroit, a city that, after decades of white flight, is more than 80 percent black. Its own student body is not far from 100 percent black. Race is also reflected in its paltry resources. The higher the percentage of black students, on average, the worse facilities a school has. And although Cass Tech is an elite school, with an exam to get in, it is a wreck: dingy classrooms, ancient lab equipment, broken hallway clocks. Out front is "Cass Corridor," known for its derelicts.

Although Mr. Cohen lists this as an "elite" school, he obviously feels the students who attend it deserve an extra boost due not to their accomplishments, but to their race alone. Thus, students who attend this elite school should receive preferential treatment over students of other races who may have received a poor K-12 education as well. I don't buy it.

He also fails to explain how giving points in admissions due to race will in any way improve the conditions of Cass Tech. I've said it before, I'll say it again - affirmative action, in the form of explicit quotas or racial point-assignment, is a policy that allows decrepit schools to remain decrepit schools. It is part of what has allowed Cass Tech to remain a "wreck." It is a band-aid over the reality that minority students often get cheated during their K-12 education. Let's concentrate on fixing that, and then affirmative action won't be necessary.

Update: OpinionJournal has a good article on campus "diversity" that addresses the Michigan case.

Why can't we all just

Why can't we all just get along?

The Washington Post has a story on conflict resolution education in schools, and the unrealistic expectations that can develop when kids are taught that any dispute can be resolved through non-violent, non-forceful means:

"Americans are dictating for the Iraqi people what a 'good life' looks like," says Puneet Gambhir, a sophomore at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria. "Why didn't we communicate directly with the Iraqi people, ask them what a government for their families and friends would look like, allow them to buy into our dream? We never created buy-in."

Ms. Gambhir neglects to clarify just how we could directly communicate with people who live under a brutal, tyrannical regime, and who hear only what their state-controlled propaganda machine allows them to hear. There is no "Radio Free Iraq." This type of thinking contains a vast logical hole, where the thinker has skipped directly over the process that would remove such roadblocks to communication - i.e., removing a dictator through violent methods. It's ridiculous - and more than a little scary - to see that anti-war ideas are being spread by teaching children that evil tyrants can be controlled through words alone, and that it's possible to communicate as freely with those living in tyranny as with those living in free countries.

Of course, one factor here is that Ms. Gambhir lives in a society and attends a school where communication works. Her teachers, however, should be qualifying all of the talk of conflict resolution with lessons on how it takes a free and democratic society in order for non-violence to be feasible, and why, in some situations, non-violence is the same as appeasement, and the "peace" that results from it is accompanied by vast human suffering.

"I hear this all the time from my 19- and 20-year-old students," says James Garbarino, a professor of human development at Cornell University. "They say they've been told to use their words, seek compromise, walk away from provocation, work with those in authority for a peaceful solution." Even the argument in favor of deterring an imminent threat doesn't work for some students, he continues: "In school, if they thought a bully was about to attack them and they attacked first, they wouldn't get very far with the principal, particularly if they 'shocked and awed' him with a lead pipe."

Yes, but if the bully continually attacked students, why can't they be taught to defend themselves and defend others? The zero tolerance rules in place in most schools punish both participants in a fight, which can only teach kids that there is no means of self-defense other than appealing to a higher authority and hoping that will fix the problem. What if (the real-world parallels here should be obvious) the "higher power" refuses to do anything about the bully, yet it's obvious that he has attacked others in the past and plans to do so in the future? Why should a kid be a target and forced to believe that violence is always wrong?

Luckily, as Joanne Jacobs points out, some kids understand that seeking compromise, while useful in high school life, doesn't always apply to international politics:

Of course, not everyone thinks that Saddam Hussein just needs a hug.

Zach Clayton, student chairman of the National Association of Student Councils, wonders whether the interpersonal skills taught in school should even be applied to international relations. "We're quick in third grade to teach nonviolent resolution strategies," he says, "but by our junior or senior years in college we know that countries can't always play paper-rock-scissors."

Learning to analyze analogies is one of those "critical thinking" skills we always hear about. For example, the school bully might be forced to toe the line by the principal. He might learn to control his anger and work well with others. There is hope. He's just a kid. By contrast, Saddam Hussein, already responsible for the deaths of a million people, must be tolerated in all his brutality or destroyed.

Well said, Joanne, well said.

No pencils neededA recent story

No pencils needed

A recent story on the use of computers in standardized testing opens with the line, "When the school testing season picks up steam next month, something will be missing in many classrooms - the No. 2 pencil." I may have to change the name of my blog.

Oregon's system of online tests, known as Technology Enhanced Student Assessment, or TESA, has spread from 28 schools in spring 2001 to more than 500 schools this year. Only Idaho and Virginia have ventured as far as Oregon in testing students on computer. In Virginia, about one-fifth of high school students will take their state tests on computer this spring. Idaho has accelerated even faster: More than 90 percent of Idaho students in grades two through 10 will take their state reading and math tests online this spring.

Oregon's standardized achievement tests, given to every student in grades three, five, eight and 10, don't simply measure how well students can read and do math. They also are used to rate teachers, schools and school districts. Each year, the state rates schools on a five-point scale from "exceptional" down to "unsatisfactory," mainly using test scores.

While children seem to prefer the computers, adults fear students will have trouble scrolling back through a long reading passage to answer questions that appear on a separate screen. They worry that students won't figure out how to get back to a question they've skipped. They think having to look back and forth from scratch paper to the computer could stymie young children. But when students actually take a test online, as they have done at Beaverton's Meadow Park Middle School and Elmonica Elementary this year, kids aren't daunted one bit, said Dee Carlton, research specialist for Beaverton schools.

Actually, the concerns about scrolling and going between screen and scratch paper are valid concerns for test takers of any age. It's interesting to see that the kids seem to prefer the computerized versions and have less trouble with some issues than do adults. I've done a great deal of reading, and some research, in the fields of graphical user interface (GUI) design and usability, and I've designed the front end for one major (yet to be implemented) large-scale standardized test. The college age students in my studies were more worried about such issues than these younger test takers seem to be.

Recognizing campus idiociesForget the Oscars.

Recognizing campus idiocies

Forget the Oscars. My favorite awards are the Pollys, otherwise known as the "Campus Outrage Awards". They're awarded by the conservative college journalism site the Collegiate Network, and John J. Miller has the scoop in NR. Sadly, this year's voting closed before Columbia professor Nicholas DeGenova made the vile comment that, "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military." at an "anti-war" teach-in. Dr. DeGenova will have to wait until next year to be properly rewarded with a Polly:

This year, however, [Nicholas DeGenova] can congratulate his Columbia University colleague Gayatri Spivak for capturing a piece of first place in the sixth annual Polly awards by uttering this lovely sentiment: "Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for self and other." Columbia shares the first-place prize with Duke University, where domestic terrorist Laura Whitehorn, who spent 14 years in prison for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1983, informed students in a lecture, "It's easy to do a bombing."

The University of Mississippi earns a second-place Polly after announcing that the students responsible for scrawling racist graffiti on the dormitory doors of three black students would face "criminal charges, possibly a felony, or it could be a federal offense." When it turned out that three black freshman were behind the incident, they were punished with "community service hours and therapeutic reflection papers."

Read the whole thing.

The coffin is nailed shutBilingual

The coffin is nailed shut

Bilingual education is dead in California, thanks to the voters who approved Proposition 227 - and the test results validate the decision to switch to English immersion:

Five years after voters approved English-only classrooms across California, the popular ballot measure seems to be working. The number of students who speak English well despite having learned a different language at home tripled last year.

Thirty-two percent of California students learning English -- more than 862, 000 -- were able to speak it "proficiently" as measured by the California English Language Development test in the fall of 2002. The rate was just 11 percent in fall 2001. About 1.8 million students took the test for the first time that year...

Among those enrolled in bilingual education who took the test both years, proficiency rose 13 percentage points -- from 3 to 16 percent between 2001 and 2002. By contrast, the proficiency of those enrolled in an English-only program rose 21 percentage points -- from 9 to 30 percent during the same year.

Ron Unz, a well-known supporter of English immersion, had this pithy comment:

"It is sort of astonishing that if they teach you English, you learn it faster than if they don't," said Proposition 227's author, Ron Unz, with a bit of I-told-you-so in his voice.

No! Really? I bet there was more than a bit of "I-told-you-so" in there, and for good reason. He did tell them so, and, luckily for California's students, the voters listened.

Update: One reader, Mark, had this to say in the comments:

I see no evidence that the test score data have been analyzed to identify any differences between students in bilingual and English-immersion programs. Nor is there any indication of an attempt to distinguish between different types of bilingual programs. One thing I remember, having been a voter in CA during the Prop 227 debates, is that bilingual ed proponents stressed that all bilingual programs were not alike, and that you couldn't use poor-quality, underfunded programs as evidence of the failure of the bilingual approach as a whole.

He has a very good point, one that I should have caught. Assignment of students to programs wasn't random - it was by parental choice. So it's possible that students in English immersion are somehow different from the bilingual ed students in ways that aren't a reflection of the programs.

So the coffin is not nailed shut, per se - but these results are encouraging, and they're the opposite of what bilingual education proponents were arguing would happen if we put more children into English immersion.

The effect of the MCASLisa

The effect of the MCAS

Lisa White, a fourth-grade teacher at Sheehan Elementary School (Westwood MA) is researching how the motivation and learning -for both teachers and students - have changed because of the requirements imposed by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam. The research is for her doctoral dissertation at Boston College, and Ms. White predicts that her study will produce results similar to those found in other studies:

A recent study by the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy based out of Boston College identified the effects of state-mandated testing on teaching and learning, comparing Massachusetts to Kansas and Michigan - three states with different requirements for students to pass state exams.

According to the study, teachers in Massachusetts not only felt the state standards were not developmentally appropriate, but that certain areas of curriculum were actually removed because the material was not covered by the MCAS. The study also reported elementary teachers said the test created extra stress for students and were concerned about the developmental timetable of what students were required to know and do at younger age levels..

I found another interesting study on the NBETPP's website. This study claims that the Massachusetts Dept. of Education is misrepresenting the pass rates on the MCAS for students using it as an exit exam. The DOE claims a 90% pass rate for students who made it as far as 12th grade, but the NBETPP feels that pass rates should include all the students who entered high school - they should use a 9th-grade pass rate, in other words. I think they have a point - the pass rate for the NBETPP-defined "class of 2003" is only 70%, and there's a big difference between African American and Latino students vs. Caucasian and Asian students - but I can see why the DOE chose to use the other benchmark. There's no way to tell how many of the students who left before 12th grade did so because of educational failures or because they simply moved or transferred to other schools.

The DOE's statement is correct, if what it is meant to answer is the question, "What percentage of Massachusett's seniors pass the exit exam?" NBETPP's criticism rests on their having redefined the question as, "What percentage of students who enter Massachusett's schools in the 9th grade ultimately continue on with their education and pass the MCAS in their senior year?"

The diagnosis, not the cureFor

The diagnosis, not the cure

For the first-time ever, third-graders in Pennsylvania will be taking the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test this week, just like their fifth-, eighth- and 11th-grade counterparts. An editorial in the Chambersburg, PA Opinion Online cautions parents and educators not to view this early testing as a cure for educational woes:

The tests are a tool, but they are not a quick fix. Giving the test two years earlier should make it easier to spot pupils who are having problems learning, though teachers and parents probably already have a good idea. More evidence at a younger age, however, could result in youngsters getting the help they need before they become disenchanted with school because of academic problems. Catching problems sooner -- rather than later -- could make quite a difference in the lives of children...

Some, however, view the process with suspicion and believe the testing is designed to prove that public schools are failing. For example, test scores of special education students will be included with the scores of other students; also, the legislation didn't include the funding that some believe is necessary to produce real improvements...

...while standardized tests can be helpful, they alone should not be used to evaluate students, teachers or schools. Interpreting test results can be a tricky proposition. It's necessary to go beyond test scores to prepare students for life today. Better systems are needed to evaluate both students and teachers -- and there should be sufficient funding to enable both to achieve. Focusing on test scores may give the appearance of fixing problems with education, but much more attention is needed to really do the job right.

It's true that testing often doesn't bring about educational reform (unless teachers were just not teaching the basics until the test required it). Testing without funding for changes may just result in the frustrating situation of knowing where the problems lie, but not being able to fix them. As for the special education scores, there are arguments to be made both for including those scores and for leaving them out. Schools that do not include special education scores can be guilty of trying to hide the number of students diagnosed as requiring special education. What's more, removing special education scores from the overall testing results can give schools an incentive to reclassify more students as such, thus enabling them to artificially boost their average scores.

Standardized testing compromiseCatholic schools in

Standardized testing compromise

Catholic schools in New Orleans are ready to accept a voucher system to allow taxpayer dollars to be used for tuition - but aren't sure they want the standardized testing that often accompanies those dollars. Sounds like they're willing to accommodate some LEAP testing, but don't want to release scores to anyone but parents. This is apparently in response to Louisiana Governor Foster's voucher plan that requires private schools who accept vouchers to also test all of their students.

Fi.Nal.Ly.I've been so jealous reading

Fi.Nal.Ly.

I've been so jealous reading about all those blogger bashes in LA & NYC - and we're finally having one in Philly! Daryl of Homeschooling and Other Educational Stuff emailed me to let me know about it. It's being organized by the leader of the PhillyBlog ring, Nicole of GoFish. Nicole will be doing the Philadelphia Race for the Cure this year, and pledges will benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. As Nicole puts it, she's running to "Make the world a safer place for boobies everywhere".

Stop the stereotype, not the

Stop the stereotype, not the tests

GREAT post by John over at Discriminations (from last week - I've been out of the loop for a while) on stereotype threat and the fallacious argument that creating different testing standards for minorities is a useful way to deal with the threat. Go read it now, and see whether you agree with John's conclusion that Claude Steele's policy recommendations would aggravate stereotype threat, rather than relieving it:

"Stereotype threat" means that blacks don't do well on standardized tests where there graders are aware of racial differences in performance on standardized tests. Thus it would seem to follow that race-blind admissions -- where the "graders" did not know the race of the applicants -- would be reasonable solution, if "stereotype threat" is the problem.

Steele does not recommend that. Quite the opposite: he actually recommends discounting the test results for blacks, thus re-inforcing the notion (or confirming the stereotype) that they do not do as well. In fact, he submitted expert testimony supporting the University of Michigan's argument that standards have to be lowered for blacks.

I love John's sarcastic conclusion:

Do any other groups besides blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans -- hillbillies, crackers, rednecks come to mind (and I use those terms positively, not negatively) suffer from "stereotype threat"? If so, shouldn't they get a break, too? What of Asians? Do they have a "stereotype boost"? (They are expected to do well on tests, so they do.) If so, should they be penalized?

Oops, I almost forgot. They are penalized.

If you aren't already reading John every day, why on earth not? Don't believe those people who tell you to get off the internet and "get a life". Go read Discriminations instead.

One alternative to race-based admissionsJeb

One alternative to race-based admissions

Jeb Bush has a lengthy article on today's National Review about the One Florida initiative that is intended to help out all low-income students, without the last resort of race-based admissions policies. I particularly like those increases in the numbers of minorities taking AP exams. Any of my Florida readers care to comment?

You can look it upYes,

You can look it up

Yes, I'm back, and swamped with work and with house adjustments....but now I'm on Blogger Pro and I have ARCHIVES now, people! Wahoo.